Abstracts—2012 Emerging Scholars Symposium
Material Matters
Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Panel 1: Places and Spaces
"Emily Dickinson and the Poetics of Glass"
Xiao Situ, Ph.D. Candidate in the History of Art, Yale University
For a poet as famously domestic as Emily Dickinson, windows were extremely important objects. After the age of thirty, Dickinson rarely left her father’s house and grounds, going only as far as the hedges of the family estate on Amherst’s Main Street. Aside from working in the garden, looking through windows and composing letters and poems while seated near windows were her primary modes of relating to the landscape around her. My paper, which draws on my dissertation-in-progress entitled “Window Culture: Emily Dickinson and the Nineteenth-Century Lens, 1830-1886,” examines how the design, texture, and materiality of nineteenth-century windows helped shape Dickinson’s poems, her conception of the creative process, and her understanding of the relationship between self and world.
Paul Strand’s 1944 photograph of the double-sash window of an abandoned New England house captures some of the mesmerizing visual effects produced by nineteenth-century New England window glass—the kind of glass that existed in the windows of the Dickinson residence. Filled with residual particles of silica and clay and marked by bubbles and waving bands, the inherent imperfections in nineteenth-century window glass distorted nature’s familiar forms into fantastical patterns. The panes in Strand’s photograph appear more liquid than solid, and the tree branches reflected upon them become frenetic ink-like skeins. Looking through such glass meant seeing a world whose structures were momentarily “let loose”—an experience of nature not unlike the kind found in Dickinson’s poems, where sunrises are unfurled color by color and views of the landscape are obtained in incremental fragments like shifting reflections on window glass.
My talk addresses not only the material specificity of the windows in the Dickinson home, but also the windows’ spatial positioning within the architectural framework of the house and the views they framed of the surrounding Connecticut Valley landscape. My broader intellectual goal is to explore how certain objects in daily material life can seem not only to influence, but also to fundamentally sympathize with, the creation of works of art.
"Ornament and Identity in the Immigrant-Built Tenements of Boston and New York, 1870-1920"
Zachary Violette, Ph.D. Candidate in American and New England Studies, Boston University
This paper seeks to understand the highly ornamented tenements of Boston and New York, built under the auspices of first- or second-generation immigrants at the turn of the Twentieth Century - an important part of the built environment of these cities that remains poorly understood, both inside and outside the academy. These buildings, which I refer to as “decorated tenements,” represent a heretofore under-acknowledged cultural contact zone and confound the usual class-based hierarchy in which elaborate decorative forms are associated with the wealthy and elite. They were also built in spite of the Progressive tenement reform movement, which advocated a ‘gospel’ of strict simplicity in the material culture of the poor and working class. To reformers, the immigrant-built decorated tenements were cheap shams, little better than the unquestionably squalid buildings they replaced, a sign of bad taste and worse judgment. The decorated tenement, therefore, is a site of contested meaning, embodying questions of taste and propriety, workmanship and honesty, class, ethnicity, and control of the built environment. This study, based on extensive fieldwork and documentary research among surviving tenements in these two cities, will interrogate the role ornament played in the formation of the meaning of these structures in a rapidly evolving urban environment, occupied by strangers, many of whom were struggling to negotiate a new identity in America. It will also challenge popular notions of the ‘slum’ as a site of unmitigated and continuing squalor, the tenement builder as only interested in quick profits, and architectural ornament as a fantasy of the gilded-age elite.
"The Materiality of Privacy: Private Spaces in Public Places at the Turn of the Twentieth Century"
Laura Walikainen, Ph.D. Candidate in the History of American Civilization, University of Delaware
At the turn of the twentieth century, urbanization, industrialization, and immigration combined to draw Americans out of the private realm of the home and into public spaces. People spending long hours in department stores, on public transportation, and in schools required spaces to cleanse, relieve, and clothe their bodies. Several emerging spaces, including department store dressing rooms, public restrooms, school locker rooms, and public baths, appeared at the boundary of the private and the public. This boundary was delineated by spaces of uncertainty where private activities, such as cleansing one’s body, were enacted in public settings, such as a public restroom or bath. The design, development, and regulation of these spaces allowed for the creation of a sense of privacy in public. These boundary spaces were sites of confluence for issues of privacy, space, and the body, as well as gender, class, and ethnicity at the turn of the twentieth century.
This paper will focus on the emergence of public restrooms to understand the relationship between the materiality of urbanization and industrialization, and the historical experience of privacy. A material-culture-based analysis connects the physical construction of boundary spaces, such as public restrooms, to their social construction. This paper interrogates contemporary blueprints, floor plans, photographs, as well as extant sites, in order to facilitate an understanding of how privacy and the social processes of the time came to be materially manifested in these emerging spaces. Americans became socialized into twentieth-century American life in part by learning to perform private acts in newly created public spaces. In the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, these spaces became not only accepted but expected.
Panel 2: Fashion and Bodies
"Consuming Bodies: Irish Slave-Ownership in Early New Orleans, 1780-1820"
Kristen L. Condotta, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Tulane University
There are problems in treating humans as objects of material study. First, people have life-spans which are shorter than many artifacts. Scholars of early American slavery, thus, are irreversibly removed from the individuals they examine. Second, enslavement was produced; but the morphing of persons into human chattel was much less uniform than processes relating to textiles or ceramics. A final issue in treating enslaved individuals as commodities is its morality. Stephanie Smallwood argues that the epistemological shift of African persons into marketable objects was the most devastating result of the transatlantic slave trade.1 And scholars must not repeat this process in their work.
Many early Americans, however, did encounter enslaved persons as consumable items. My paper engages this reality by looking at the material habits of Irish immigrants in New Orleans (1780-1820). Most Irish travelers to late colonial and early national Louisiana arrived with little contact with slavery, beyond abolitionist tracts. Once settled, however, they entered a consumer world where enslaved Africans were advertised alongside imported linens and where a purchaser’s prestige related to the number of persons they owned. My research indicates that Irish immigrants eagerly “bought into” the slave-holding habits of their New Orleans’ neighbors. The question then is: why? My paper uses newspaper descriptions, personal letters and notarial records to uncover how migrants fit human chattel into their preexisting consumer lives. It particularly argues that slave-ownership offered Irish persons a space to transition Old World expectations (especially relating to luxury goods) to New World material landscapes. Ultimately, my paper pushes scholars to accept the less pleasant, material aspects of American slavery. It contends that only by doing so can we understand the complicated consumerisms of transatlantic, slave-holding cities like New Orleans.
"Art Deco Sartorientalism in America: Persian Urban Turbans and Other Versions"
Jaimee K. Comstock-Skipp, M.A. Student in the History of Art, Williams College
This paper focuses on the turban in American fashion between 1918-1935. This interwar time period is an exciting era to study turban forms because of the global, political, and social changes taking place. American women donned the turban as a cultural marker to position themselves between East and West, modernity and tradition, past and present.
Besides genuine turban fashion pieces, the study examines fashion and world news articles and advertisements from 1918-1935 featured in The New York Times and other syndicates in order to illuminate the discourse on American turbans in the context of 1920s globalization. The paper’s critical approach draws on Roland Barthes’s discursive relationship among linguistic, vestimentary, and visual systems in The Fashion System by linking the fashion world to world events. Barthes’s theories help to articulate the abstract political meanings denoted by the turban as a worn item. American turbans associated with an ambiguous Orient are part of sartorial Orientalism, what I have coined Sartorientalism. My concept interprets American turban popularity as a type of colonialism operating at the subliminal level. Lacking an empire of its own, the Orient’s colonization within the American mind in the guise of pervasive and centuries-old stereotypes proves to be more tenacious than a temporary, physical hold on a geographic region.
After 9/11, the turban was associated with fanaticism and terrorism, but just last year they again emerged on the runways. This paper seeks to illuminate the American turban’s complexities embedded within its folds that are not acknowledged—or known— by the average American wearer. In the interwar period full of Orientalized Westerners and Occidentalized Easterners, and also that of today, generations continue to adopt the turban to flaunt its multilayered meanings.
"Limitation Order L-85: Creating and Consuming Women’s Fashion during World War II"
Melissa Ann Peck, Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies, Purdue University
This paper examines the restrictions placed on women’s clothing during World War II—specifically the regulations established in 1942 by the War Production Board (WPB)—and the limitations that it placed on those who could take part in the consumer process that was literally and figuratively linked to citizenship and more explicitly belonging.
In 1942, the WPB issued mandate L-85, which provided the United States clothing manufacturing industry with strict regulations concerning textiles and clothing production. The L-85 mandate subjected every garment (as well as the majority of textiles) to some degree of redefinition or reduction. The WPB went so far as to measure thousands of women across the country and create a “Body Basic Chart” in accordance with the average measurements for each misses’ size (at the time misses sizes ran on average between 10-20). Limits were imposed on the total amount of material yardage permitted for each size with the goal of using the smallest possible amount of fabric. These yardage limits led to the creation of a distinctly American women’s fashion exemplified by the female suit that appeared during this period: a shortened version and minimalistic design that is best described by the L-85 rule “no fabric over fabric.”
Through its precise language and strict regulations, Document L-85 defined the ideal female form during WWII. Shortly after the implementation of these rules, ads for exercise equipment and other forms of body manipulation began to appear in various newspapers and magazines throughout the country. Since prescribed measurements and sizes could not be altered in any way for any article of clothing, it became the responsibility of the female consumer to literally reshape her body to meet these federal regulations. The WPB also emphasized conservation of resources, such as textiles, that were vital to supporting the troops, and the L-85 regulations included a stipulation against any drastic change in women’s fashion so that clothing would stay in style for a longer period of time. Thus the WPB not only created a female form but also assured that it would remain static—essentially freezing the female body.
While I argue that the WPB in effect created women’s bodies for them and then required those bodies to remain stable throughout the war, I also show how designers during this period were inspired by these limitations to create a distinctly “American Look” that has permeated U.S. fashion ever since. Due to the occupation of the majority of Western Europe, especially Paris, American designers were forced to look beyond European fashion that had dominated the American market. Interestingly, the WPB immediately created and implemented Document L-85 within months of the U.S. entering the war and the closing of European markets. The federal government’s intervention in American fashion through the strict regulation of Document L-85, and the resulting American designs, reveals the role that women’s fashion has played in revealing, concealing, and communicating citizenship through a visual and socially significant medium.
Panel 3: Consumption and Technology
"Pocket Wireless and the Shape of Media to Come, 1899-1922"
Grant Wythoff, Ph.D. Candidate in English, Princeton University
Before Marconi’s wireless telegraph could even print out an entirely legible message, the idea began to circulate of a portable transmitter and receiver so small that it could be carried around in the pocket. “Pocket wireless” became a means through which wireless telegraphy, the precursor to radio, was explained to the public. With prototypes demonstrated and marketed to the public by 1914, it was hoped that the device would “materially assist to popularize wireless,” moving the new medium out of the domain of basement experimenters eavesdropping on naval transmissions or playing with their own cryptic codes, and into the realm of the everyday. Pocket wireless succeeded in doing this, not only as a functional device that crystallized the differences between wireless and wired telegraphy, but as a fictional device in novels and films.
A minor figure in media history, pocket wireless was never adopted to any great degree and quickly passed over in favor of more practical modes of communication. But it constituted a pattern of expectation that held sway over the reception of wireless telegraphy for two decades, taking on a range of material manifestations. Drawing equally on science and technology studies, media theory, science fiction studies and narrative theory, my presentation assembles a genealogy of this gadget as it circulated in the form of “baseless” speculation, diagrams, prototypes showcased for the press, props and plot devices in fiction and film, vaporware advertised alongside X-ray specs and vitamin tonics in the back of popular science and children’s magazines, and more recently, an anecdote trotted out as a century-old “prediction” of the mobile phone.
Building off of my dissertation research on the cultural history of that alternately functional and fictional device, the gadget, this presentation will explore how a technical object circulates through culture not just as a tool, but as a kind of narrative that feeds back on the perceived functionality of the tool itself. Against the background of a public conversation on digital media that worries over the degree to which gadgets are fundamentally altering the way we communicate, read, and even think, I argue that “medium” is a historically open category through which users negotiate a range of both real and imagined capabilities.
"Reanimating Slavery: Memory, Automation, and the Alabama Coon Jigger"
Chris Dingwall, Ph.D. Candidate in History, University of Chicago
At the turn of the twentieth century, as Americans looked toward a future increasingly dominated by corporate organization and mechanized industry, they sought comfort in pastoral idylls of the antebellum slave plantation.1 My paper will examine this duality as it was crystallized in a dancing black automaton—Tombo, the Alabama Coon Jigger. Manufactured by the Ferdinand Strauss Corporation of New York in 1910, Tombo became a best-seller, its wind-up mechanism entrancing children with an “endless variety of ‘steps’” which "far excels the best efforts of the most expert professional dancers."2 So well did Tombo capture the spirit of contemporary consumer desire that, at the beginning of the Christmas shopping season in 1915, even John Wanamaker ran out of stock in his flagship Philadelphia department store.3At first glance, Tambo seems no different from Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, or the other myriad forms of the "old time darkey" which corporations appropriated to sell their machine-produced goods.4 Yet Tambo did more than sate its producer’s desire for profit and its consumers’ desire for racist imagery; by representing automated motion with the figure of a slave, it "animated" more complex anxieties about the role of human labor in the origin and destiny of American modernity.5 Analyzing the marketing, material form, and surreal motion of Tambo and other automated slave toys of the era—from "Topsy" dolls to full minstrel bands—I will argue that animated figures of slavery were used to negotiate the growing presence of machines in everyday life. By focusing scholarly conversations about the American memory of slavery around a mass produced consumer object, I will also hope to illuminate the ways in which slavery continues to serve as a visible representation in—but forgotten history of—modern consumer culture.
1 Karen L. Cox, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South was Created in American Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: the Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
2“The Alabama Coon Jigger: the Champion Dancer of the World,” advertisement in Johnson Smith & Co. Catalogue (Chicago, n.d.), 9, in Puzzles, box 1, Warshaw Collection, Archive Center, National Museum of
American History, Smithsonian Institution.
3 William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1993), 85-86, 86n61.
4 M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998); Kenneth W. Goings, Mammy and Uncle Mose: Black Collectibles and American Stereotyping (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
5 Bill Brown, “Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny,” Critical Inquiry 32 (Winter 2006), 175-207.
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"Materiality and Meaning: AstroTurf, Progress, and the Postwar American Stadium"
Benjamin Lisle, Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies and Integrated Studies, Colby College
This paper examines artificial grass—as material and symbol—in American sports stadiums in the 1960s and 1970s. “AstroTurf,” first used in 1966, was a blanket of bristled, green, nylon tufts laid atop a foamed plastic base. Advocates of synthetic grass—primarily manufacturers, sports businessmen, and journalists—pitched it as more uniform, safer, more cost efficient, and even aesthetically superior to natural grass (which could be lumpy, patchy, muddy, and expensive to maintain). The rapid adoption of artificial turf was remarkable: every major municipal stadium constructed from the late 1960s through the 1970s had artificial turf, and older stadiums converted from natural grass to synthetic surfaces. Artificial turf was, I argue, an expression of what historian Michael L. Smith calls “commodity scientism.” It articulated a postwar faith in science and technology that was displaced onto a salable commodity. For many, artificial grass embodied the “magic” of chemical science.
Artificial grass as material resisted the interpretations advocates imposed on it. Many soon realized that although synthetic fields were arguably more cost effective, they also produced more injuries, altered play, and were an aesthetic blight. Previously an expression of humankind’s ability to produce a chemically engineered, new-and-improved nature, artificial grass became a symbol of “progress” run amok. Synthetic grass instead represented a tipping point in the rationalization of stadium space and the modern urban landscape more generally; Americans increasingly questioned built environments that were so regularized and “functional” that they were barely livable.
This paper speaks to an audience beyond the academy by illustrating tensions between the material world and its cultural representations. It shows how objects have a “voice” that can resist imposed meanings. This proposition is implicit in material culture studies, but typically absent from our lived experience of the material world and things that seem too mundane to be ideological.
Panel 4: Identity
"Anti-material Culture"
Jason LaFountain, Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University
The merits of material culture studies are now widely recognized, but scholars rarely talk about material culture’s shortcomings. What are its weaknesses, its obfuscations?
In this presentation I utilize my dissertation research—a study of an anti-material discourse that describes godly living as a work of art in English and American Puritan practical theological writings (1560-1730)—to pursue these questions. Whereas Puritan theologians often write about object-making, including painting, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking, to describe the “art of living to God,” they do so only to negate the material practices that serve as their theoretical models. The Puritan art of living to God is anti-material, anti-formal, and anti-worldly. It posits the “mereness” of material form, material existence, and material making.
How does one deal with a cultural milieu in which form and materiality are conceived of altogether differently from how today’s scholars tend to conceive of them? The topic I am researching resists the methods of material culture analysis in a variety of ways. I present concise critiques of important recent material culture scholarship on Puritanism, demonstrating how authors prepossessed by materialist methodologies have developed misleading arguments about both Puritan literature and Puritan material culture.
I ultimately argue that anti-materialism is a major blind spot for material culture studies. While I do not intend to take issue with the idea that human existence is material, or that anti-material ideas are conveyed through anything other than material relations, means, and media (in the case of my project printed texts especially, as well as some manuscripts), there are episodes in cultural and intellectual history, and in the history of art, to which sincere anti-materialism has been crucial. Anti-materialism does not always or only operate as a mask for material interests. It can be a compelling, critical, even radical, intellectual position.
"Bringing the Master-Slave Relationship into Focus: Photographic Slave Portraits in the American South, 1839-1861"
Matthew Amato, Ph.D. Candidate in History, University of Southern California
The rise of photography—from the 1840s to the 1860s—unleashed a radically new way for proslavery and antislavery forces in America to depict, possess, preserve, and circulate knowledge about the world of southern bondage they sought to either defend or destroy. My paper assesses one part of this development. I examine how, during the 1840s and 1850s, masters across the South began commissioning portrait photographs of their slaves. This cultural phenomenon has gone unanalyzed by previous scholars. By exploring the production histories, visual elements, and social uses of these little-studied objects, I shed new light on the antebellum master-slave relationship. Slave portrait photographs largely envisioned bondage as a benevolent institution. In doing so, such images reflected and shaped masters’ paternalist claims about their own humaneness and the comfort of their bondspeople while erasing the brutal realities of late antebellum slavery. Yet for slaveholders to transform the bodies they owned into sentimental images they could hold, gaze upon, and share, they had to let their slaves pose in front of cameras—and, thus, see themselves anew. Moreover, as they circulated photographs of their bondspeople, masters opened up the possibility that others would not see a benevolent system but rather the cruelties and contradictions of enslaved humanity. Ultimately, as I reveal, the distinctive nature of the photographic experience along with the portability and perceived transparency of the photographs loosened the control slaveholders held over the very meanings they sought to concretize. While my paper illuminates a crucial moment in the history of American slavery, it also raises broader questions about the historical and contemporary role of images in perpetuating and subverting racialized hierarchies.
"More than a Song: Photography and the Visuality of Musical Objects in the Early Twentieth-Century South"
Andrew Nelson, Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies, University of Maryland
In the first three decades of the twentieth century, people living in rural areas throughout the American South frequently posed for photographs holding guitars, banjos, songbooks, and other musical objects, indicating that southern musicians of various walks of life conceived of music-making as a visual as well as an aural activity. These photographs are often outdoor portraits that depict one or more musicians in a particular setting, such as a family at home, workers at a sawmill, or singers at church. Using a handful of these images as primary objects of analysis, this paper contends that the creation of such photographs was a significant act of cultural production in the rural South that enabled black and white southerners to exercise their personal agency by using musical objects to make visual statements about their individual, familial, and community identities. Situating the paper in the early twentieth century South allows me to analyze the images in the context of ideological struggles surrounding race and gender in the time period and during an era when photography was becoming widely available.
My paper is intended to reach a broad audience and exemplifies the possibilities of material culture research in two ways. First, the paper illustrates the ability of photographs to reveal aspects of musical practice, culture, and identity that are not represented in written documents. Second, in considering musical instruments and songbooks not only as tools for making music, but also as artifacts used to visually represent particular cultures and identities, I offer a case study that exemplifies the ability of objects to speak in profound ways that reach beyond their primary purpose. The paper therefore asks the audience to consider both the value of photography in historical and cultural research and the often overlooked and deeply significant visual dimension of popular music.