English

Meeting a little princess in the secret garden

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 23:46:38 +0000

Meeting a little princess in the secret garden Rachel Sauer Mon, 12/23/2024 - 16:46

Adamari Ruelas

CU ��«��Ƶ Associate Professor Emily Harrington examines the enduring power of stories we read in childhood and what we can learn from them as adults

When many people think of December, their minds are filled with thoughts of snow, warm drinks, family and childhood. This is the time of year when memories of childhood bubble to the surface—burnished by time to seem simpler and happier.

For avid childhood readers, a profound element of those memories is the books they read in their youth, which can continue to play a significant role in their adult lives. Frances Hodgson Burnett, who died 100 years ago this fall, was the author of such books—the kind that young readers devour and still swoon over in adulthood.

“In these books like The Secret Garden, the kids are the ones who are empowered to figure things out for themselves and who are in worlds that are magical or partially magical. That kind of magic attaches itself to the kids,” says Emily Harrington, CU ��«��Ƶ associate professor of English.

Her most famous works, including A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, continue to be fan favorites for young children and books that many adults consider the beginning of their reading careers.

Remembering Frances Hodgson Burnett

Frances Hodgson Burnett is a household name in the world of children’s literature. Her beloved novels are perennially popular with children and have been made into multiple film adaptations. However, says Emily Harrington, an assistant professor in the English Department at the ��«��Ƶ, who has taught a course on children’s literature, it is important to critically examine even the beloved books of childhood—not allowing memory to obscure what adult readers may recognize as controversial aspects of children’s literature.

Critics and educators have been noted how Hodgson Burnett portrayed characters of color in her novels. For example, in The Secret Garden, the character Mary is unhealthy because she grew up in India. Martha, a sympathetic character, contrasts people of color with "respectable” white people. Modern readers have questioned the effect that could have had on the children reading these stories.

Harrington notes it’s important to teach the novels in a way that doesn’t dismiss their issues: “Both (A Little Princess and The Secret Garden) have some super problematic, racist attitudes. It’s not why they’re remembered but I think it’s important to acknowledge,” Harrington says.

When looking back on novels written in the early 20th century, it isn’t uncommon to discover undertones of racism or sexism.

Some argue that racism was more normalized at the time some books were written, but even in the context of a work’s time, it is important to recognize and consider these issues when they exist in novels written for children, Harrington says. She also notes Burnett’s questionable views about medicine, which are apparent in The Secret Garden, when a wheelchair-bound child is able to walk after a little exposure to fresh air. Burnett believed that nature and God were the solution to most medical issues, which can change the meaning of the Secret Garden as being a magical place outside that fixes all medical ailments.

A lifetime effect

However, even if some of their content makes a modern reader pause, the novels that young readers enjoy can have lasting echoes in their lives as adults. Childhood fans of Harry Potter, Percy Jackson and many other novels may continue to visit those worlds in their minds as adults or to wish they could be transported by books in the way they were as children. This includes Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novels, which many readers continue loving into adulthood. A large part of this connection is how the books made young readers feel while reading them, Harrington says.

“In these books like The Secret Garden, the kids are the ones who are empowered to figure things out for themselves and who are in worlds that are magical or partially magical. That kind of magic attaches itself to the kids,” Harrington says.

"All the people who enjoy these books can take the parts that they love and keep them," says Emily Harrington, CU ��«��Ƶ associate professor of English. (Illustration: by Inga Moore from The Secret Garden)

Due to this escape that children can experience while reading these novels, the stories, characters and places can stay with them into adulthood. It isn’t rare to see someone who is still as deeply infatuated with novels such as A Little Princess or The Secret Garden as an adult because those books have been those escapes for many generations of children. And as parents or grandparents read these novels to children, the cycle continues, and the literary love is passed to new generations.

Even with Hodgson Burnett’s questionable beliefs, as well as aspects of her novels that trouble modern readers, readers still are able to take the best parts of these magical worlds and make them their own, Harrington says. That, in turn, allows the children who read them to make these fictional worlds their own, she adds.

She notes that this is a process that many children experience while reading these novels as a form of escapism: “[As they grow up, children may think] ‘This magical world is mine now, and it’s not going to be racist or anti-trans. I’m gonna imagine myself in it in my own way and reject the parts of the legacy that I don’t want.’

“All the people who enjoy these books can take the parts that they love and keep them, and hopefully had enough alternate influences that counteract the colonialist ideology,” Harrington says, citing common issues with The Secret Garden and A Little Princess.

Best friends forever

For many avid childhood readers, books have been a major part of their lives for as long as they can remember and the characters in them their lifelong friends. Those reading experiences can transfer deeply into their adult lives, especially when correlating reading with comfort, Harrington says.

Further, a study published in the journal Psychological Medicine last year found multiple points of positive correlation between early reading for pleasure with subsequent brain and cognitive development and mental well-being. Also, the most recent Scholastic Kids and Family Reading Report finds that while 70% of 6- to 8-year-olds love or like reading books for fun, that number shrinks to just 47% among 12- to 17-year olds.

R. Joseph Rodriguez, a teaching fellow with the National Book Foundation, told NEA Today, “The joy of books has been killed. Suppressed, tested and killed. I hate when students are called ‘struggling readers.’ We need to see them as students who need a revival! I want a revival!”

Educators, researchers, parents, health care professionals and children themselves study and discuss how to support and encourage reading—from alleviating testing pressure to proving time and space for reading, supporting diversity in children’s literature and not dismissing the literature that children actually enjoy as “frivolous.”

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CU ��«��Ƶ Associate Professor Emily Harrington examines the enduring power of stories we read in childhood and what we can learn from them as adults.

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Top illustration by Inga Moore, 1944

Outstanding grad unearths roots of challenges to Black women authors

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 15:10:36 +0000

Outstanding grad unearths roots of challenges to Black women authors Rachel Sauer Fri, 12/20/2024 - 08:10

Clint Talbott

Jane Forman, who is earning her BA in English, summa cum laude, is named the college’s outstanding graduate for fall 2024

Jane Forman has painstakingly recounted evidence that Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, Pulitzer Prize winner Nikole Hannah-Jones and other prominent Black women authors have faced challenges to the authenticity and quality of their work, and that these critiques emanate from racist and sexist conceptions of who is rightly considered an author and an authority.

Forman, who is earning her BA in English, summa cum laude, deeply impressed her faculty committee, and she has been named the outstanding graduate of the College of Arts and Sciences for fall 2024.

Her thesis is titled “Deconstructing Archival Debris in the Margins: How Black Women Writers Navigate Intersectional Oppression During the Authorial Identity Formation Process.”

Jane Forman, who is earning her BA in English, summa cum laude, is the College of Arts and Science outstanding graduate for fall 2024.

In this work, Forman considers cases of Black women authors who were unfairly denigrated and rebuked because their intersectional identity made them targets. Forman cites troubling episodes of Claudine Gay, former president of Harvard; Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project; Toni Morrison, winner of a Pulitzer and Nobel Prize; and others.

When she spoke recently with Daryl Maeda, interim dean of the college, Forman described her thesis as a “contemplation of how our history continuously influences contemporary figurations of American life.”

In her thesis, she concludes: “The history of slavery is all of ours to confront, disregarding our contemporary racial and gender positionality in America. The virulent debris that emerged from slavery’s formal demolition continues to infect society today … We are all implicated in how this history attempts to exert influence over our collective present and future.”

Jennifer Ho, director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts, Eaton Professor of Humanities and the Arts and professor of ethnic studies, served as Forman’s thesis advisor. In her written narrative to the faculty thesis defense form, Ho said Forman’s thesis was made especially strong by her tracing of the “archival debris” across three periods of Black female authorship:

“Using critical race theory as her main theoretical touchstone, Jane considers the intersectional oppression that plagues Black women writers—the way that they must continuously navigate charges of plagiarism, incompetence and illegitimacy. Combining close reading/explication with theoretical applications of critical race theory, Jane takes readers through the troubling trend of discounting Black women writers due to sexism and racism, linked to U.S. history of anti-Black racism and white supremacy.”

In a letter of support for Forman, Emily Harrington, an associate professor of English who served on Forman’s committee, said Forman’s work “is easily the best senior thesis I have read during my career.”

Through all her thesis chapters, Forman “draws a direct connection between the various ways in which Black women authors have been questioned both in their authenticity and in the quality of their work, from the ‘first’ African American poet to the present day,” Harrington said, adding:

“Having also taken graduate seminars as an undergraduate, Jane is the most advanced undergraduate I have encountered at CU. … She has been a leader in our department, and I cannot think of a more ‘outstanding undergraduate.’”

In the acknowledgment section of her thesis, Forman shares some personal reflection and advice:

“For anyone uncertain of what they should do or where they should go, I urge you to follow the path that leads you toward the most expansive feeling. Three years ago, I dropped out of Georgetown University, unsure of what my life would be like. I didn’t know where I wanted to be, but I knew I couldn’t stay there. Despite the tumultuous journey that led me here, I feel eternally grateful for where I ended up.”

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Jane Forman, who is earning her BA in English, summa cum laude, is named the college’s outstanding graduate for fall 2024.

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Spinning stories of birds, magic and 19th-century science

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 14:30:00 +0000

Spinning stories of birds, magic and 19th-century science Rachel Sauer Mon, 12/16/2024 - 07:30

Cody DeBos

In new novel The Naturalist Society, CU ��«��Ƶ alum Carrie Vaughn offers a fresh take on historical fantasy

For New York Times bestselling author and ��«��Ƶ graduate Carrie Vaughn (MEngl’00), the boundary between science and magic is a playground.

Her latest novel, The Naturalist Society, released last month, transports readers to an alternate Victorian era in which scientific discovery and arcane magic coexist. Here, the Latin binomial nomenclature used to classify plants and animals grants extraordinary powers to certain scientists.

The novel is a departure from Vaughn’s usual urban fantasy or mystery settings, for which she's been nominated several times for the Hugo Award and won the 2017 Colorado Book Award in the genre fiction category. She recalls a friend joking, “Hey, you like birds, you should write a book about them!”

In her new novel The Naturalist Society, Carrie Vaughn (MEngl’00) explores an alternate Victorian era in which scientific discovery and arcane magic coexist.

From that comment, she spun a tale blending 19th-century Victorian science and a distinctive magic system—with a splash of romance added for good measure.

“I tend to do this a lot, take several different ideas and smoosh them together to see what happens,” Vaughn says. “The story developed pretty quickly and went in some unexpected directions. It’s not just historical fantasy, but also alternate history.”

When research meets imagination

Creating an immersive world for the protagonist of The Naturalist Society to traverse was more than a work of imagination. Vaughn immersed herself in research while preparing to write the novel.

“I read a bunch of history of the natural sciences, about Darwin and the impact of his ideas,” she says. “And I kept my Sibley Field Guide to Birds on my desk the whole time.”

Vaughn also drew inspiration from Victorian-era literature.

“I read some Edith Wharton to get that flavor of upper-class New York City in the late 19th century,” she says.

As any writer can understand, Vaughn’s work on The Naturalist Society didn’t come without challenges. Stepping away from her familiar urban fantasy worlds—she reached the New York Times Bestseller list with her long-running novel series about Kitty Norville, a Denver DJ who is also a werewolf—to tackle a historical setting took Vaughn on a lengthy fact-finding journey.

Despite completing extensive research, Vaughn admits the process felt never-ending. “As much research as I do, it never feels like quite enough. It’s impossible to be completely thorough.

“Using a concrete historical setting means I’m very aware of all the possible mistakes I could make. I’m waiting for readers to start emailing me about what I got wrong,” she jokes.

Still, Vaughn considers these trials part of the creative process. She strives to remain open to all ideas and let her stories evolve naturally—a tricky balance to strike while keeping The Naturalist Society grounded in history.

The Naturalist Society is a departure from the urban fantasy and murder mystery genres in which Carrie Vaughn has widely written.

Embracing the unexpected

For Vaughn, The Naturalist Society is more than just her latest novel; it’s part of a larger journey as a writer. Throughout her career, Vaughn has written more than 20 novels and 100 short stories spanning every genre from urban fantasy to murder mystery.

“I’m always looking for new stories to tell,” she says. “I go where the stories tell me to go. I like the challenge of trying new genres and tropes.”

Vaughn’s exploratory approach to storytelling is rooted in experimentation. She says she enjoys the surprising outcomes that emerge after taking time to reconnoiter new settings or blur the lines between genres.

This approach helps The Naturalist Society exist as a historical fantasy novel while also transcending the conventions of the genre.

From CU ��«��Ƶ to a career of discovery

Vaughn’s ability to weave complex stories is no accident. She credits her time at CU ��«��Ƶ for giving her a firm foundation in her craft.

“I need to give a big shout out to Professor Kelly Hurley,” Vaughn says. “Her seminars on Victorian and Gothic literature have stayed with me.”

She says these classes, among others, helped shape her understanding of storytelling. Time spent reading and discussing books and literature during her degree studies also played a pivotal role in Vaughn’s career.

“If I can write across genres and settings, it’s because I’ve read across genres and settings,” she explains. “I go back to Professor Hurley’s ideas and reading lists all the time. She helped fill a well that I’m still drawing on.”

Advice for writers

Every aspiring writer’s journey is unique, Vaughn says, and her experiences emphasize the value of exploration and risk-taking. Her advice to writers looking to try new genres or settings?

“Read widely! Look for inspiration in unlikely places.”

She also encourages writers to embrace bold ideas and trust their instincts.

“When I’m working on an idea and find myself thinking, ‘This is crazy, people will never go for this,’ I know I’m on the right track,” she says.

With The Naturalist Society, Vaughn has unlocked yet another creative direction for her work, but her latest novel is just the beginning of her foray into historical fantasy. She’s already working on a sequel and aims to build further on the world she created.

Learn more about Carrie Vaughn and The Naturalist Society on her website.

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In new novel The Naturalist Society, CU ��«��Ƶ alum Carrie Vaughn offers a fresh take on historical fantasy.

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Readers are taking in the ‘trash’

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 17:39:31 +0000

Readers are taking in the ‘trash’ Rachel Sauer Wed, 11/20/2024 - 10:39

Adamari Ruelas

CU ��«��Ƶ scholar Katherine Little explores how Colleen Hoover and similar authors have taken over bestseller lists and social media

Colleen Hoover fans cheered last month when the film version of her novel Reminders of Him was announced to be in the works at Universal Pictures and slated for February 2026 release. On the heels of the almost $150 million that It Ends with Us, a 2024 film based on another of Hoover’s novels, earned domestically, even non-fans or those not on TikTok probably know that a new Colleen Hoover film is a big—and lucrative—deal.

Hoover and a cohort of bestselling authors that includes Ali Hazelwood, Emily Henry and many others have taken over the reading—and sometimes film-adaptation—world one romance novel at a time. Their rise to literary fame writing novels that critics often dismiss as “trashy” can be attributed in large part to social media, especially BookTok, a subcommunity in the TikTok app dedicated to books. In fact, “BookTok authors” is a sales metric that Publishers Weekly tracks, and cites seven of the 10 bestselling adult novels of the first nine months of 2024 as being written by BookTok authors—who also happen to write romance or romantasy.

Katie Little, a CU ��«��Ƶ professor of English, has taught a course called Trashy Books.

This raises the question: What is the enduring appeal of these “trashy” novels? Why are they so popular?

First, it helps to understand what exactly makes a novel “trashy.”

“There isn’t one correct answer to what makes a book ‘trashy,’” says Katie Little, a ��«��Ƶ professor of English who has taught a course called Trashy Books, adding that the word “trashy” suggests these novels are in some way bad—poorly written, too sexy or simply a waste of time.

“It’s the marketing,” says Little. “Usually, somebody who is writing a trashy book understands themselves to be writing it for a particular audience looking for something fun to read, looking for romance.”

Some even argue that these novels are intentionally “trashy,” and sales figures might back that up. NPD BookScan reports that 2022 adult fiction sales rose 8.5% from 2021, growth that was led by a 52.4% increase in romance book sales. So, the authors of these novels likely understand that they are not writing books for academic or high-literary audiences but are purposely writing what Little calls “books for fun.”

“Books that we read for fun do have a bad-for-you aspect, and sometimes people aren’t as aware of it because they’re just looking for something fun,” Little explains. Books for fun are what some consider to be books that aren’t challenging to read—a concept that has shadowed fiction almost since the first fiction was written.

Books for education

Through human history, books have been essential for formal—and even self-directed—education, and the prevailing idea has been that people could not consider themselves educated if they did not know how to read or if they didn’t read often.

Colleen Hoover is one of the leading "BookTok authors," or authors who are beloved in the book-focused subcommunity of TikTok.

With the invention of the printing press and the growth of mass publication, books—and particularly novels—became a more popular and accessible means of entertainment, not just education. Even before the printing press—as early as the first century AD and The Satyricon by Petronius Arbiter—novels were generally regarded as the dumber, less respectable offspring of the epic poem. So, it wasn’t a far leap to “trashy” books that are more about fun and entertainment than enlightenment.

And while it might be an exaggeration to claim that social media have had as significant an effect on people’s reading habits as, say, the printing press, the effect has nevertheless been significant—specifically BookTok. A community within the social media app TikTok, BookTok is dedicated to all things books—from book reviews to news about authors and new releases—and made writers like Colleen Hoover into bestselling authors. BookTok content creators have embraced romance and romantasy novels that might be termed “trashy,” helping to make the genres a driving force in publishing.

“What’s changed with social media and BookTok is that people are reading books, and they don’t really read books the way they used to,” Little says. “[Readers] don’t have this sense of ‘I should be reading a better book,’ as in better written, more intellectually challenging.”

But what does BookTok mean for the future of reading? Little asks what would happen if people put similar effort into reading Shakespeare or other highly regarded authors that they put into BookTok—the lighting, the recording, the influencing and tagging. In a recent article in The Atlantic about student reading abilities, several college professors expressed fear for future generations: Will they learn how to analyze, explain and understand difficult texts that are meant to challenge readers?

“I still think that books are the path to education,” Little says. “I understand people want to read for escape, but I also want people to read to use critical ways of thinking and knowledge.”

According to Little, one day Colleen Hoover and similar writers will fade in popularity, just as many authors have before her. “Even if writers exhaust the romance—the trashy books line of writing—people are so creative, they’ll come up with something else that will percolate in a different way.”

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CU ��«��Ƶ scholar Katherine Little explores how Colleen Hoover and similar authors have taken over bestseller lists and social media.

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Swastika Counter Project launches

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 21:19:27 +0000

Swastika Counter Project launches Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/24/2024 - 15:19

Bradley Worrell

Public advocacy website envisioned by CU ��«��Ƶ associate professor Laurie Gries tracks swastikas across the U.S. and offers resources to counter those hate-filled incidents

In the months leading up to Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Laurie Gries, director of the ��«��Ƶ Program for Writing and Rhetoric and associate professor of English, became increasingly concerned about almost-daily news reports of swastikas—sometimes accompanied by hate-filled messages—showing up in public spaces across the country.

“This was the same time when various sources were reporting rising incidents of hate and bias in the United States, when Donald Trump and his racist and divisive rhetoric was just coming into political power, and when white nationalist organizations seemed to be coming out of the woodwork,” she says.

Laurie Gries, director of the ��«��Ƶ Program for Writing and Rhetoric and associate professor of English, became increasingly concerned about almost-daily news reports of swastikas—sometimes accompanied by hate-filled messages—showing up in public spaces across the country.

Determined to address the issue of the swastikas head on, Gries began working on a project with a team of interdisciplinary scholars with expertise in visual communication, critical geography and social justice education. Their aim was to identify how and where swastikas were placed, who they targeted, what messages they conveyed and how communities responded. The coordinated results of that five-year effort—which document 1,340 swastika incidents in total—recently went live on The Swastika Counter Project website.

Recently, Gries spoke with Colorado College of Arts and Sciences Magazine about the Swastika Counter Project. Her answers were lightly edited for style and condensed for space limitations.

Question: How did the swastika project come together and why did you decide you needed to address this issue?

Gries: When Trump first came onto the political scene, I started hearing about increased incidents of hate and violence, and as a visual rhetoric scholar, I began noticing more and more reports of swastikas showing up on the streets of the United States.

On the day that Trump was elected, I woke up deeply concerned and asked, ‘What if I tracked these swastikas? What if I took the digital research method called iconographic tracking that I worked for 10 years to develop and applied it to this particular case? What might we discover?’

I didn’t really start tracking swastikas on that day; I just made the commitment because I had long wanted to use my scholarship for public humanities research. I guess, then, one might say that Trump was the motivator, but really it was fear. At the time, a lot of people—the FBI, the Southern Poverty Law Center, journalists and scholars—were attributing a rise in antisemitism and violence to his rhetoric. It was my fear that if that’s the case, those incidents were surely only going to be amplified as he rose to power.

I don’t have any comparative data (i.e., data on swastika incidents) prior to Trump’s arrival on the political scene to confirm whether that’s true or not, so I’m very careful to say that the data we collected can’t really be used as evidence for that claim, but in our data, we certainly can see that there are a lot of associations that people are making between swastikas and Donald Trump and white nationalism.

Question: Was no one else tracking and compiling these incidents in which swastikas were being placed at houses of worship, schools and other sites?

Gries: Actually, there are quite a few projects that have tracked antisemitism, and even swastikas, but they have been constrained in various ways. Some sites only track antisemitism that happen on college campuses. Some track antisemitic events that happened all over the world. Then there are sites like ProPublica, whose tracking projects were limited to a particular year. So, I wanted to create a project that would transcend some those constraints.

Question: What are some of the top findings of your research as it relates to swastika placement, any language accompanying the swastikas, maybe any surprises your research uncovered?

Data analysis by The Swastika Counter Project found at least 1,300 documented incidents of swastikas in the United States between Jan. 1, 2016, and Jan. 20, 2021.

Gries: I think it’s important to note that the swastika incidents we discovered occurred in all 48 contiguous states and in the District of Columbia, so this is a national problem. Of course, they were showing up more in cities with large populations, which is to be expected. But we were surprised that according to our data, swastika incidents most often surfaced in schools, and almost equally in K-12 and higher education settings. We thought swastikas might mostly show up on the exterior of religious institutions, and particularly Jewish religious institutions, but that wasn’t the case.

We also were surprised to discover so many swastikas surfacing in private spaces. Of course, a lot of swastikas were spray painted on the exterior of buildings in urban spaces. But our data discloses how swastikas were often drawn on people’s cars, on their homes, on the dorm doors of students, and in some cases, on the interior walls of people’s homes that had been broken into and, in one case, lit on fire.

I think the other most surprising finding was just the horrific language that was showing up alongside swastikas—from racist and homophobic appeals to white nationalism to implicit threats of surveillance and violence to direct threats of genocide. And also that such threats were directed at not only Jewish community members; a lot of Black American, Latinx, LGBTQ-plus community members and immigrants were also commonly targeted. It was just overwhelming—the multi-directional hate and very graphic violence.

Question: How did Colorado compare to other parts of the country when it came to swastika incidents?

Gries: For Colorado, there were 30 reported incidents in our data set. So, I would say it’s not uncommon in Colorado for these swastikas incidents to occur, and I’ve had a lot of people tell me about swastikas they witnessed that aren’t even in our data set.

We know, for instance, that Colorado State University in Fort Collins has had so many swastika incidents that they recently created an antisemitism task force. One of our (Swastika Counter Project) advisory board members is actually heading up that task force because antisemitism on that campus has become such a serious problem.

In contrast to the incidents of public swastikas that The Swastika Counter Project tracks, some cities worldwide have also seen anti-swastika graffiti. (Photo: Cogiati/Wikimedia Commons)

Question: Beyond tracking incidents of swastika placement around the country, what other kinds of information can be found on the Swastika Counter Project website?

Gries: Part of our challenge was figuring out how to present the data in ways that would be useful for a variety of community stakeholders—people who are dealing with swastika incidents in their communities, such as school administrators, teachers and parents, the local police force, and local and national politicians. We wanted to create a swastika tracking project that has a strong civic component to it, which I think makes this project a bit unique. So, we created an interactive map that can be filtered in different ways; data visualizations that can be easily downloaded; and educational resources and lesson plans for teachers at various levels. We also generated two different reports, one of which describes and analyzes how different communities have responded to swastika incidents, so that stakeholders can read those accounts and learn from them. That’s especially important, because in our research we found that the various stakeholders often worked in isolation in responding to swastika incidents.

Question: The Swastika ‘Counter’ Project—is it fair to say the name is a play on words?

Gries: Yes—it’s a double entendre. The goal is to both count and counter the contemporary proliferation of swastika incidents in the United States. And in that sense, the Swastika Counter Project is very much a scholarly activist project.

When we first began tracking swastika incidents, we planned to simply report our data and let the evidence speak for itself. And to a great extent, the data still does do that. Our findings report, for instance, is largely descriptive. But the longer we worked on the project and discovered the gross horror of violence that was ensuing, the more we felt compelled to also take more concerted action by building out the educational component of the website. So today, I don’t pretend that the data advocacy website isn’t motivated by my own desire to try to address some very real, pressing problems and to use my scholarship to try to create a more just world. This is very much a project where I’m wearing my activism on my sleeve.

Question: What kind of assistance did you have when it came to tracking and compiling data, creating visual representations, developing a website, etc.?

Gries: The central work of tracking, coding, and analyzing was done by myself and Kelly Wheeler (assistant professor at Curry College), but we soon realized we needed more help. I reached out to Morteza Karimzadeh in the geography department here at CU ��«��Ƶ, and he and his former student, Jason Miller, ended up doing all the amazing work with the mapping part of the project.

Residents of Eugene, Oregon, responded against swastikas found in a city neighborhood in 2017. (Photo: SBG Photo)

I am also really proud that we received a lot of help from various students at and beyond CU. For instance, an undergraduate computer science major at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, worked on the data visualizations with us, while graduate students from that same institution helped to create some of the lesson plans. Here at CU ��«��Ƶ, a team of undergraduate students enrolled in a technical communication and design class in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric did a user-centered study for us to help develop a website that would be easy to navigate and comprehend for a public audience. And then another group of tech comm students helped us figure out how to invite community participation through features under the Contribute tab of the website. In this sense, the Swastika Counter Project is really exemplary of the immense value that data humanities and public humanities education can have for both undergraduate and graduate students. I am really excited about that.

Question: People who commit several years of their life to a project will often call it a labor of love. Is that how you would describe this project?

Gries: For me, I don’t think it was about love so much as it was about committing to do social justice work and really trying to walk the walk. I mean, as you might imagine, it was not fun to track so many incidents of hate and violence around the country. …

It’s also just been a beast in terms of labor. I tell people that this project was probably more intense work than my first 350-page monograph because I had to teach myself so many new skills, not only in terms of research, but also guiding and managing team projects, doing data advocacy, and developing web content skills. I am so glad I did this project, but for the last eight years, it’s just been very intense.

Question: If former President Trump is elected to a second term in November, do you think you would take up this project again?

Gries: I’m really, really torn. Part of me wants to try to secure some national funding and put together a larger team. If I did, I would also want to research (swastika incidents during) the Biden administration, and then start tracking in the present time, too, because I think that longitudinal study would help us address certain questions that we weren’t able to address in this project.

On the other hand, I started this project in early 2017, and it became a large part of my life. My husband would tell me that on days I was doing the researching and the coding that I was affectively different. I was angry. I was upset. I was impatient.

I honestly don’t know if I want to put myself through that again on a personal level. I truly believe that more arts and humanities faculty need to be doing this kind of work, as I think we can bring an important perspective to data-driven research that addresses pressing socio-cultural problems. And maybe if I had the funding and could put together a large enough team where I didn’t have to bear so much of the burden I would consider it, but right now I just don’t know.

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Public advocacy website envisioned by CU ��«��Ƶ associate professor Laurie Gries tracks swastikas across the U.S. and offers resources to counter those hate-filled incidents.

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Flying with the man behind the capes

Anonymous — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 18:44:03 +0000

Flying with the man behind the capes Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/18/2024 - 12:44

Doug McPherson

CU ��«��Ƶ alumnus Patrick Hamilton discusses his new book on influential comic book artist George Pérez during Hispanic Heritage Month

When alumnus Patrick Hamilton was growing up, he, like many kids, found comfort in comic books. “I’m an almost lifelong comics fan, and specifically a fan of ‘Avengers’,” Hamilton says.

As Hamilton continued enjoying comics and learning more about the people behind them, he eventually came across the name George Pérez. It’s a name you may not immediately recognize, and that’s a key point Hamilton makes in his new book, George Pérez, which hit shelves earlier this year.

“The main argument of the book [is] that Pérez had a larger impact on comics than he’s generally been given credit for,” says Hamilton, an English professor at Misericordia University in Pennsylvania who earned his PhD in English at the ��«��Ƶ in 2006.

CU ��«��Ƶ alumnus Patrick Hamilton (PhDEngl'06), a lifelong comics fan, highlighted the groundbreaking work of Marvel Comics and DC Comics artist George Pérez in an eponymous new biography.

But in the comic book world, the name George Pérez and his work turn heads—not just for his impact on the art, style and story structure of comics, but because he was one of the first Hispanic artists to become a major name in the industry and helped pave the way for greater diversity in the field.

Pérez, who worked both as an artist and writer starting in the 1970s, played a significant role in blockbuster series such as Fantastic Four and The Avengers for Marvel Comics. In the 1980s, he created The New Teen Titans, which became a top-selling series for publisher DC Comics. And he developed DC Comic's landmark limited series Crisis on Infinite Earths, followed by relaunching Wonder Woman.

Hamilton says Pérez is also “pretty synonymous” with large event titles, most prominently DC Comic’s Superman revamp in 2011 and Marvel’s Infinity Gauntlet.

“And he developed a reputation for a dynamic and hyper-detailed style, particularly in terms of the number of characters and details he’d put into a page, that was highly regarded and ultimately influential in the … 1970s and 1980s and beyond.”

Hamilton says he sees his book as attempting to expand Pérez’s legacy.

“Despite his acclaim and prominence, he hasn’t really been seen as an artist that contributed to the style and genre of comics in ways artists before him … are seen,” he says. “I argue in the book that Pérez made contributions to the style of comics, not only in the layout of the page and what effects that could achieve, but especially in his way of building what we would call the story world around the characters, where he embraced the possibilities for the fantastic within comics.”

Paving the way

The book also speaks to Pérez’s interest in representations of race, disability and gender, the latter of which Hamilton says Pérez consciously strove to improve in his art over his career.

Artist George Pérez was reknown for his work with both DC Comics and Marvel Comics. (Photos: DC Comics, left, and Marvel Comics, right)

Hamilton adds that he believes a lot of other Black, Indigenous and artists of color working today likely see Pérez as “an influence and as carving out a space” for them within the industry.

“I think you can look at the significant number of Hispanic and Latinx creators working in comics today—many of them as artists—and see them as following, in some cases quite consciously, in Pérez’s footsteps.”

He adds that Pérez did much to help define the look and feel of modern superhero comics in the 1970s and 1980s, as did another Latino artist, José Luis García-López.

“Garcia-Lopez, who, among other things, created the official reference artwork for DC Comics that is still much in use today. So, you have two Latino creators working in the late 20th century, when the comic book industry was even more predominantly white than it is today, and shaping the look of it.”

Hamilton says one of the more interesting findings about Pérez that meshes with how Pérez has been overlooked is a kind of “invisibility or transparency” in his art.

“It [his art] is never meant to overshadow and … is always in service to the story or narrative. What surprised me is how much this was a conscious choice on Pérez’s part, that he never wanted his art to draw attention to itself in a way that was detrimental to the overall storytelling. It’s kind of ironic, and … surprising, because Pérez does have one of the most recognizable styles in comics, but his goal as an artist was always to do what’s best for the realization of the story first.”

Perez died in 2022 at age 67. You can see examples of his Marvel Comics art here and his DC Comics art here.

Top image: A group scene of DC Comics characters drawn by George Pérez (Photo: DC Comics)

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CU ��«��Ƶ alumnus Patrick Hamilton discusses his new book on influential comic book artist George Pérez during Hispanic Heritage Month.

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Stephen Graham Jones slashes his way into Texas literary history

Anonymous — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 19:34:25 +0000

Stephen Graham Jones slashes his way into Texas literary history Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/06/2024 - 13:34

The CU ��«��Ƶ Ineva Baldwin Professor of English is part of a Texas Literary Hall of Fame induction class that includes Cormac McCarthy and Molly Ivins

Stephen Graham Jones, author of bestselling horror novels The Angel of Indian Lake and The Only Good Indians, among other award-winning works, has been inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame.

Born in Midland, Texas, Jones relocated to ��«��Ƶ in 2008, where he continues to serve as the ��«��Ƶ Ineva Baldwin Professor of English.

CU ��«��Ƶ Ineva Baldwin Professor of English Stephen Graham Jones has been inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame, a recognition whose previous recipients include Larry McMurtry and Sandra Cisneros.

“When I moved away from Texas for Colorado, I kind of suspected Texas might forget about me, even though a lot of my novels since then have been set there,” he says.

But if Jones’ admission into the state’s Literary Hall of Fame is any indication, Texas didn’t forget about him.

Established in 2004, the Texas Literary Hall of Fame recognizes the literary contributions of the Lone Star State’s most celebrated writers. Inductees are announced every two years by the Texas Christian University (TCU) Mary Couts Burnett Library, the TCU AddRan College of Liberal Arts, the TCU Press and the Center for Texas Studies.

“The Texas Literary Hall of Fame showcases top literary writers across the nation,” Sonja Watson, dean of the AddRan College of Liberal Arts, says on the Texas Literary Hall of Fame website. “This group of inductees follows a long list of others who demonstrate how Texas has shaped the cultural landscape of their writings.”

Joining Jones this year as he enters the Hall of Fame are Sergio Troncoso, Cynthia Leitich Smith, Jan Seale, Molly Ivins, Tracy Daugherty and Cormac McCarthy. Past honorees include Larry McMurtry and Sandra Cisneros.

“Colorado is home now, but Texas will always be where I'm from, and I'm honored and thrilled to be inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame,” says Jones. “My father-in-law’s photo is in the Texas Capitol, which I always thought pretty special. This, to me, is that same kind of special.”

The official induction ceremony will take place on Oct. 29.

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The CU ��«��Ƶ Ineva Baldwin Professor of English is part of a Texas Literary Hall of Fame induction class that includes Cormac McCarthy and Molly Ivins.

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Jim Halpert is looking at all of us

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 20:21:18 +0000

Jim Halpert is looking at all of us Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 08/05/2024 - 14:21

Rachel Sauer

In a recently published paper, CU ��«��Ƶ PhD student Cooper Casale interrogates Jim Halpert’s direct-to-camera gaze in The Office and its similarities to what he calls the ‘fascist look'

A couple of years ago, Cooper Casale was dating a woman who loved the American version of “The Office.” Despite having watched seasons two and three on repeat in middle school so he’d have something to talk about with a girl he liked, a decade had passed and he wasn’t really a fan anymore.

“But I end up being sucked into it,” recalls Casale, a PhD student in the ��«��Ƶ Department of English. “I watched all the way through multiple times—it becomes a kind of hypnosis. It was just always on.”

Through nine seasons and repeated watching, Casale began to wonder: Is Jim Halpert looking at me?

In a newly published paper, CU ��«��Ƶ PhD student Cooper Casale argues that the Jim Halpert gaze represents the punitive aspects of mainstream culture that are foundational to enforcing and maintaining capitalism.

In the 650 times that Jim Halpert (played by actor John Krasinski) looks at the camera through those nine seasons—there’s even a 10-minute compilation video of them on YouTube—Casale began considering what or who he was seeing in the Jim Halpert gaze: the pitiless scientist, the capitalist boss or the fascist father? Or perhaps all three?

In a paper recently published in the Journal of Popular Culture, Casale considers how the Jim Halpert gaze is also the fascist look.

“The Fascist Look enlists its subjects into their make-believe hero's service, a role audiences want to occupy,” Casale writes. “They want to please Halpert, as the worker wants to please the foreman. Their peculiar loyalty partly explains ‘The Office's’ remarkably enduring popularity…

“Halpert's Gaze arms people against their feckless bosses, slovenly neighbors and annoying coworkers. At the same time, his frozen glare, his pranks and his sarcasm represent the punitive aspects of mainstream culture that are foundational to enforcing and maintaining capitalism. Halpert does not critique his corporate arrangement but merely masters it. He becomes its boss, and viewers enamored by his cruel fiction but powerless to act it out, choose, in Halpert, a more nightmarish boss than they had before. Furthermore, viewers are thankful because he reminds them that the great can still overcome the small.”

Microdosing work

First, though, a sorry-not-sorry: While Casale appreciates a lot of the humor in “The Office,” he increasingly resents its popularity now that remote work is so common. He wanted to understand how the “almost liturgical pattern in which some people watch it” has become a sort of surrogate to having an in-person, so-called work family, he explains. “There are some who never turn it off. When I was in publication for this paper, my editor was like, ‘You can’t prove that,’ and I can’t, not yet, but there’s an observably strange practice in people watching this show on rotation all the time.

“So, the initiating question was ‘Why do people come home from a 9 to 5 and immediately watch a show about 9 to 5?’ Theodor Adorno wrote about this in his essay ‘Free Time,’ about how free time is itself a kind of work. We have to spend those hours after work preparing to return to work, so people watching ‘The Office’ is almost like microdosing having to go back to work.”

In the character of Jim Halpert, Casale says, “The Office” established an everyman protagonist—a frustrated dreamer and creative type who somehow ends up in a meaningless job at the world’s most boring business. When he looks directly at the camera, he conveys that he recognizes the absurdity and ridiculousness around him and that he is somehow above it.

Citing another Adorno work, “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” which observes that enlightenment and barbarism are often linked, Casale notes that “Jim Halpert represents this enlightened corporate subject. He’s presented as smarter than everyone else, but we see how fast that enlightenment has to express itself through barbarism or violence in the pranks he’s constantly pulling on Dwight.

Actor John Krasinski played the character Jim Halpert in "The Office" and looked directly at the camera 650 times over nine seasons. (Photo: NBC Universal)

“Dwight’s biggest crime in the whole show is that he likes his job. He’s presented as naïve, sentimental, he likes beets and ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ and because of his sentiment he must be punished. We’re meant to believe that Jim really deserves to be somewhere else, and he’s only there because he’s unlucky, but it’s everyone else’s fate to be there. Kevin will never do better, Stanley will never do better, but it’s Jim’s fate to overcome the circumstances of his life. We’re meant to find his cruelty affable.”

“The Office” reaffirms the strange hierarchies of corporate America but sells them as quirky, Casale says. Its documentary style becomes a two-way mirror between Jim Halpert and viewers—in Jim’s disgust, annoyance, resentment or bemusement, viewers have a proxy in lieu of their own documentary camera recording their reactions to the clowns and fools around them.

Interrogating power

The Jim Halpert gaze becomes the fascist look when considered through the lens of power, Casale says: “We have this TV show teaching me that the best way to express my power is to lend it to somebody else who can punish people in my stead. It’s similar to how a vote for an autocrat is a vote to not have to vote anymore. We see it in the working class voting for Donald Trump, who’s only going to give tax breaks to the rich. But because they want to be rich, there’s an aspect of living out their dreams through him.

“I think people always struggle with how members of the working class can vote against their self-interest. Part of it, I think, is that people’s resources to express themselves or express some kind of autonomy are so impoverished that their last opportunity to be free is to live in surrogate through someone else. If Jim Halpert can prank these people and humiliate all his coworkers, then I can live vicariously through Jim Halpert.”

Casale adds that rather than interrogating the structures of power and capitalism that Jim Halpert ostensibly gazes against, “The Office” emphasizes a message that mimicking the behaviors of power will lead to having power. In “The Office,” Jim Halpert is in control—not Michael, not Dwight, nor any of the other characters to essentially serve as his minstrels.

“I think that’s the fascist myth,” Casale says. “It’s a desire to be dominated so I can learn the procedures of how to dominate others. In my own domination, I learn what it feels like and how I can do it. We see this with any kind of autocrat, including Jim Halpert. When Donald Trump says he wants retribution, there are thousands upon thousands of regular, pretty nice people who say, ‘I want retribution, too.’ And because they won’t direct their anger to capitalism, the real culprit, they have to have proxy wars about DEI, gender, immigration, whatever else, so they won’t have to focus on the real cause of their powerlessness.”

Top images: NBC Universal

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In a recently published paper, CU ��«��Ƶ PhD student Cooper Casale interrogates Jim Halpert’s direct-to-camera gaze in The Office and its similarities to what he calls the ‘fascist look.'

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We fear them like the plague

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 15:44:39 +0000

We fear them like the plague Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/18/2024 - 09:44

Rachel Sauer

After a human case of bubonic plague was confirmed in Pueblo County last week, CU ��«��Ƶ scholar Thora Brylowe explores why it and all plagues inspire such terror

Of all the specters humanity fears—the storms and wars, the failures and disasters and vagaries of nature—perhaps none is so pervasive and terrible as plague.

Not just Plague with a capital P—bubonic plague, caused by the Yersinia pestis bacterium, the Black Death of 14th-century Europe that killed anywhere between 25 million and 200 million people—but all plagues, real or fictional, that sweep in from other places or rise from Earth itself, scything through populations with maddening indifference, toppling cities and civilizations, swapping hard-won humanity for the animalistic instinct to survive.

When Pueblo Department of Public Health and Environment officials confirmed a human case of bubonic plague last week, the announcement made national news. Even though we have long known that Yersinia pestis is transmitted by fleas and cycles among wild rodent populations, and even though it can be treated with antibiotics and human cases are now extremely rare, mention of this plague—and of all plagues—still can spark fear.

Thora Brylowe, an associate professor in the CU ��«��Ƶ Department of English, covers plagues real and fictional throughout history in the course Plague and Pandemic.

In an era of vaccines, antibiotics and multi-platform public health campaigns, and of more accurately terming them epidemics or pandemics, why are plagues still so terrifying?

“One reason is that plague can have this intense moral valence,” says Thora Brylowe, an associate professor in the ��«��Ƶ Department of English who has taught a course called Plague and Pandemic. “For a lot of history, people have viewed plagues as God’s punishment. We saw that at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, where some people were saying God was punishing certain populations.

“And if it’s not God’s punishment, then it might be framed as survival of the fittest, which we saw during COVID. We’re desperate to find reasons for why this thing we can’t control, or don’t think we can control, is happening.”

A history of plague

The fear of plague, the horrible death it brings and its inexorable and ruinous march through entire populations, countries and continents has informed human history keeping and art almost since the beginning of such things. The 10 Plagues of Egypt detailed in the book of Exodus in the Old Testament—estimated to have been written in the 13th century BCE—still hold a terrible fascination.

Likewise, the Plague of Thebes, ultimately attributed to Oedipus’ sins in Sophocles’ 429 BCE play Oedipus Rex, can still stir anguish two millennia later:

For all our ship, thou see'st, is weak and sore

Shaken with storms, and no more lighteneth

Her head above the waves whose trough is death.

She wasteth in the fruitless buds of earth,

In parchèd herds and travail without birth

Of dying women: yea, and midst of it

A burning and a loathly god hath lit

Sudden, and sweeps our land, this Plague of power;

Till Cadmus' house grows empty, hour by hour,

And Hell's house rich with steam of tears and blood.

Oedipus Rex is one of the works that Brylowe uses or references in teaching Plague and Pandemic, a list that also includes Daniel Defoe’s 1722 CE Journal of the Plague Year and more modern works like Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2002 novel The Years of Rice and Salt and the 2021 board game Bristol 1350.

Through art and historical documents involving plague, certain themes emerge, Brylowe says, including a desire to “other” certain populations as plague bringers or plague carriers; to frame plague as something that came from outside or faraway places; and to answer the possibly unanswerable question of what it means to be human.

Plague is morally fraught, Brylowe adds—from forced inoculations for smallpox and involuntary removal to isolated colonies for people with leprosy (ostensibly undertaken in the name of population health) to willfully ignoring plagues happening on other continents.

"Bring Out Your Dead," a ca. 1864 wood carving by artist Edmund Evans, depicts a town crier on a medieval street during the Black Death. (Photo: National Library of Medicine)

“If you look at the Ebola narrative, initially it was that this was happening in a little remote village in western Africa and nobody was doing anything about it, but then somebody got on an airplane and now it’s going to kill us all,” Brylowe says. “We were able to ignore it until suddenly it’s in Virginia.

“It doesn’t help that plagues have been really sensationalized, and the way we talk about them isn’t always accurate. I remember reading (Richard Preston’s 1995) The Hot Zone, and my takeaway was that Russia has huge, sloshing buckets of smallpox lying around. I’m not sure that’s a great way to talk about what we fear.”

Fear of the uncontrollable

Fear, however—especially fear of what we seemingly can’t control—does inspire art. What is the zombie genre, Brylowe asks, if not an exploration of plague? “There also are a lot of arguments for vampirism being a form of plague, if you think about it as a disease spread through blood,” Brylowe explains. “So much of the plague narrative is exploring how it makes you either not human or less human.

“It’s interesting when that runs into our desire for human beings to ultimately be good, for humanity to triumph in a ruined world. In Train to Busan, which is a movie I love, the single dad saves his daughter and saves the day by sacrificing himself in a zombie outbreak, and we see that as a very good and moral outcome. When that equation is flipped, like in The Walking Dead, and the plague is not God’s punishment, but humans are the monsters, that’s a moral complication that’s maybe more realistic but probably can’t give us a happy ending.”

Plague in art often reflects humanity’s fears and uncertainties specific to the time in which it’s created, Brylowe says, which may help explain why current books and films dealing with plague are often associated with climate change—plague-causing viruses emerging from razed rainforests, plague species growing uncontrolled in rising and warming oceans.

Exploring plague in art also is a way of exploring and understanding self, she says: “At a basic level, plague is about our bodies. This is where we really see the subject-object dichotomy. It’s saying, ‘If this thing that is not me infects me, what does that mean for my body as an object?’ We talk about plague as a way to explore the relationship between mind and body. I think that’s part of the reason why monsters that look like humans but are not human are so scary. The body as an object has taken over, and we don’t know where self exists anymore.”

Top image: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

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After a human case of bubonic plague was confirmed in Pueblo County last week, CU ��«��Ƶ scholar Thora Brylowe explores why it and all plagues inspire such terror.

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Ghost stories: understanding a present haunted by the past

Anonymous — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 17:49:15 +0000

Ghost stories: understanding a present haunted by the past Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 06/07/2024 - 11:49

Blake Puscher

A CU ��«��Ƶ poet considers the socioeconomic and political environment of the turn of the 20th century through the history of her own family

Mud, Blood, and Ghosts is not a typical history book.

To write it, Julie Carr delved not just into archives and manuscripts, but also into her own family’s history—specifically, the story of her great-grandfather Omer Kem, a People’s Party politician who served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives representing Nebraska between 1891 and 1897. Kem’s story weaves everything from populism to eugenics to spiritualism, and represents a broader narrative of a particular time, place and people in the American West.

Subtitled “Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West,” the book, through Kem, tells the story of how factors as disparate as economic inequity, water scarcity and scientific racism, among many others, shaped the region and the country and still resonate politically and socially today.

Julie Carr, a CU ��«��Ƶ professor of English and chair of the Department of Women and Gender Studies, plumbed her family's history to write Mud, Blood, and Ghosts.

In crafting the book, which was published last year, Carr, a ��«��Ƶ professor of English and chair of the Department of Women and Gender Studies, blended historical exposition with poetic language, a way of writing that she says is essential for expressing complex emotions. Because of the personal nature of the subject, Carr says, she was interested in speaking from her own perspective in the present as well as from Kem’s perspective in the past, demonstrating the idea that history is always with us.

In this sense, the reference to ghosts in the title has a double meaning, not just refering to 19th century spiritualists, but how “we are haunted by our pasts. They are with us all the time, and they are directing what we do,” Carr says.

“To acknowledge that is to take responsibility for it, to think, ‘Given all of that, what is my responsibility to the future and to the present?’”

A farmer’s populism

Omer Kem was born in 1855 in Hagerstown, Indiana, to an itinerant and largely unsuccessful farmer who often moved his family to find better work. Kem’s family was ravaged by disease and continuing financial instability, so he set out on his own, ultimately moving to Nebraska. As a young man, he farmed through government programs like the Swamp Lands Act and the Homestead Act, but failed due to infertile conditions. Many farmer settlers in Nebraska were in a similar situation, falling into debt as the seeds they sowed blew away in the hot winds of the region’s 1889-1899 drought.

When Kem ran for and won a seat in Congress, his experiences inspired him to join the populist movement of the time along with many rural farmers and other people living in poverty. The movement was a response to the economic and social conditions of the Gilded Age, according to Carr:

“Both urban laborers and rural laborers were left in the lurch,” as the former lacked protections like the eight-hour workday and the latter faced unregulated crop prices and railroad rates, among other issues. Meanwhile, with no graduated income tax, the people at the top did not pay more, and there was no significant social safety net at that time.

Mud, Blood, and Ghosts details how factors as disparate as economic inequity, water scarcity and scientific racism, among many others, shaped the American West and the country and still resonate politically and socially today.

“All of these things combined with the problem of weather and climate in the Plains states,” Carr says. Many poor farmers had moved to states in the Great Plains region during the mid- and late-19th century following the Homestead Act, but in dry climates, the land couldn’t produce without massive irrigation. In the South, where climate was not the issue, “we’re looking at a totally different dynamic having to do with the end of Reconstruction, and poverty among Black farmers especially.”

What unites the People’s Party with today’s populists might be its criticism of the societal elite, Carr says, “coupled with the demand for greater representation in politics. I think a lot of people would say that many contemporary American populists, on the right or the left, are people who for various reasons have not felt included in the political system.”

American eugenics at the turn of the 20th century

Kem also was influenced by the racial segregation and fear of “mixing races” that was both commonplace and largely unchallenged for several generations after the Civil War. Along with large swathes of the American public, Carr says, Kem came to believe in the ideology of eugenics, a term coined to describe attempts at increasing the number of people with “superior” mental and physical traits through the human equivalent of selective breeding. It grew, in part, from elements of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, particularly the heritability of traits.

“The science itself was not very detailed,” Carr explains. “It was the beginning of an understanding of how genetics works. That science got married to criminology, ideas around welfare, the problems that came with urbanization, the first wave of the Great Migration and the huge numbers of immigrants coming in during the beginning of the 20th century.”

These major demographic and political changes made some people afraid, especially members of dominant groups, Carr says. Because of the widespread belief that many traits and behaviors were inherited, eugenicists justified ostracizing or marginalizing people who were Black, poor, disabled, criminals and immigrants, insisting they would “taint” the gene pool.

“Many people who believed in ‘progress’ believed in eugenics,” Carr says, including those who might be considered left-wing. “That’s important to say because it points to the ways in which white supremacy and fascistic thinking can bleed into different political mindsets or belief systems.” Even prominent feminists of the time like Margaret Sanger espoused eugenic beliefs, though she never fully bought into forced sterilization as Kem did, Carr says.

The spiritualist movement

In addition to eugenics, Omer Kem believed in spiritualism, a movement centered around the idea that it is possible to communicate with the spirits of the dead. Carr notes in her book that spiritualism was common in Midwest Populist circles as well as among the general public; there were an estimated 5 to 6 million adherents by the 1860s, according to a historian cited by Carr.

A number of scholars document spiritualists’ involvement in progressive political causes. For example, the Bland family, Washington, D.C., activists whom Kem met when he moved to the capital after being elected to Congress, were populists as well as the founders of the National Indian Defense Association, a reform organization that opposed the forced assimilation of Native Americans.

CU ��«��Ƶ Professor Julie Carr focused on the story of her great-grandfather Omer Kem to explore the history of spiritualism, populism and eugenics in the American West and the United States.

At a dinner that Kem had with the Blands after he had been placed on the House Indian Affairs Committee, the Blands’ niece Maggie, a purported medium, described the ghosts of Kem’s mother and beloved sister Ellen as glowing orbs hovering near his head. This led to a series of encounters with his dead family members, including his son Bert.

Carr suggests that the Blands might have been using their spiritualism as a form of lobbying, as after these encounters with his dead relatives, Kem became very close to the Blands and did, in fact, advocate for their cause in Congress. Later, Kem’s spiritualism took another turn when he began to “see” a Native American “spirit guide” who he believed had entered his body.

Historians understand the prevalence of Native spirit guides differently. Some interpret it as yet another form of removal, reducing Native Americans to spectral presences, while others argue that spiritualists were generally sympathetic toward Native Americans, and sometimes used the “voices” of Native spirits to advocate for reforms (though these generally involved coerced assimilation through institutions such as the Indian schools). While this may have been a form of social justice work, it was a distorted one, according to Carr, based as it was on both appropriation and projection.

“In my great-grandfather’s case,” Carr says, “he started having visions of the ‘spirit’ of a ‘Native American healer’ entering his body in the 1890s when he was in Congress. He maintained this imagined relationship with this ‘spirit’ for the rest of his life. I think there’re some interesting psychological dynamics going on there, one being a desire to identify with Native Americans because of the way that he understands Indigenous people as having a legitimate right to the land.

“The other complexity is that, even as he’s making speeches on the congressional floor advocating for at least some level of Native sovereignty, he is also legislating for the further removal of Native people from land. In that split, you can see a kind of crisis. If nothing else, it has to be a crisis of conscience. Creating for himself, in a sense, an imaginary friend in this spirit guide he calls ‘Fleet Wind’ is a way, I think, to respond to that crisis of conscience. Perhaps this is true of many forms of appropriation and projection.”

Kem’s “complex history of bad and good luck, of power struggles, and of property,” as Carr describes them, highlights how the past haunts the present like a ghost, despite the flaws of its actors. Carr finds stark contrast between the past and the present in the People’s Party platform: “This Republic can only endure as a free government while built upon the love of the whole people for each other.”

“Though this word love, like the phrase the people, has so often been cheapened, distorted and mobilized for violent ends,” Carr writes, “I still want to ask: What if we took them at their word?”

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A CU ��«��Ƶ poet considers the socioeconomic and political environment of the turn of the 20th century through the history of her own family.

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