Critical QuestionsBefore Reading. What factors give us a feeling of community and identity? How is our sense of communal identity based on difference?
Taking it Further. Sometimes we feel both inside and outside a community simultaneously. How does a community provide an implicit sense (or code) of what it means to be "normal"? Can there be community in which individual differences somehow make no difference? How do we think about and express distinctions between ourselves and others? Are these differences the sense of an
us versus a
them inevitable?
Electronic Framework Readings
Ruben Martinez, "Going Up in LA"
Leonard Kriegel, "Tunnel Notes of a New Yorker"
Kai Erickson, "Collective Trauma: Loss of Communality"
Daniel Kemmis, "The Last Best Place: How Hardship and Limits Build Community"
Randall Balmer, "Georgia Charismatics"
Jacob Riis, "How the Other Half Lives"
David Sibley, "Feelings About Difference"
Robert Berkhofer, Jr., "The White Man's Indian"
Gwendolyn Brooks, "We Real Cool"
Web Connections for Chapter 2
Ruben Martinez, "Going Up in LA"
The Internet offers several important sites on graffiti, the most extensive of which is ART CRIMES. Look at some of the examples of graffiti from cities around the world contained there. How are these similar to or different from the graffiti discussed in "Going Up in LA"? Look closely at one section and consider how the examples there express violence, anger, alienation, and specific political statements. Does graffiti look the same on the street as it does on the Web?
The tradition of Mexican art includes major figures known for their publicly displayed and often highly political murals. Diego Rivera, for example, produced murals during the first half of the twentieth century on such topics as Zapatista revolutionaries, the concept of good government, and land redistribution. He also produced works for and on display in the United States, such as
Detroit Industry,
North Wall and
South Wall, and the mural on Pan American unity at the City College of San Francisco. Visit the City College of San Francisco site to learn about the Diego Rivera Mural Project. You will be able to view panels of the mural, read critical interpretations, and consult a key to the historical figures the mural represents. How is this sort of mural different from the graffiti discussed in "Going Up in L.A."? What sorts of political statements does it express?
Think also about the concept of audience. Who or what sorts of readers know best how to read current L.A. graffiti? What kind of literacy must one have to understand them? On the other hand, what kind of literacy must a viewer have to read Rivera's murals? How different might it be to study the City College mural on the Web than to see it in person?
Leonard Kriegel "Tunnel Notes of a New Yorker"
Visit the Website about the famous New York City graffiti artist Keith Haring to explore a view that diverges sharply from Kriegel's. Because the site's genre is biography and hagiography rather than critical essay, its celebration of graffiti art and Haring in particular are obvious. What pro-graffiti arguments undergird this Website? How do the site's arguments differ from Kriegel's? How does the site identify Haring in terms of socioeconomic class, race, gender, and sexuality? Do these identifications differ from what Kriegel implies about the graffiti artists he describes and laments? Are Haring's drawings political?
The magazine
Raw Vision has a Website dedicated to disseminating information and images about the works of so-called untrained artists. For example, look at their pages on the artist from India, Nek Chand. He built sculptures made of scrap material and found objects and then installed them illegally at night in public places. When and how did his work become legitimized as art? Does it involve political commentary? How is the Web instrumental in publicizing his work globally? Is it possible that Kreigel would grant the artistic value of graffiti abroad more easily than in the place he calls home?
Kai Erikson, "The Loss of Communality"
Explore some of the links to Buffalo Creek and Appalachia on the Internet. How have matters changed since 1972? Is the physical environment the same? Is the cultural environment the same?
Look at the Website for the Center for Virtual Appalachia (CVA) and consider representations of Appalachia in popular culture. What stereotypes about Appalachia does the site examine? Are there traces of the idea of communality in pop culture representations? Does the idea become distorted or misrepresented? Is Erikson's essay in some ways a response or a correction to popular notions about Appalachia and the people who live there? How so?
Look at Websites about Mother Jones, who was a leader in labor and community organizing in Appalachia. How does Erickson's idea of communality help to illuminate her biography and her worldview?
Daniel Kemmis, "The Last Best Place: How Hardship and Limits Build Community"
Re-read Kemmis's article and trace his references to the nineteenth century German philosopher Hegel. What ideas about America did Hegel have, according to Kemmis? Why does Kemmis use Hegel as the central philosophical authority in the essay? Then, visit the Website below, in which the scholar Olufemi Taiwo rejects Hegel's geographical mapping of philosophy and history. Why does Taiwo reject Hegel's geography? After reading Taiwo, how do you re-read Kemmis and his uncritical invocation of Hegel's claims about geography?
Kemmis's speech is grounded on his allegiance to the United States and his sense of nationalism or patriotism. Montana, however, contains large Native American reservations. For example, several Websites are associated with the Blackfoot Nation.
- University of Florida Center for African Studies ("Exorcizing Hegel's Ghost: Africa's Challenge to Philosophy" African Studies Quarterly)
- Study the Blackfoot Nation's page on nationhood and then contrast its sense of nationalism to that of Kemmis
- You might also look at a site sponsored by the Blackfoot business community. Does its construction of nation and the future coincide more easily with that of Kemmis?
Randall Balmer, "Georgia Charismatics"
The Internet provides evidence that many churches are interested in crossing sectarian boundaries. Indeed, religious communities use the Internet to build faith-based communities in cyberspace, rather than only building a geographically based congregation. Many of these groups also cross boundaries of politics (or public policy and activism) with religious practice. The Christian Coalition, a politically conservative network, and Jubilee 2000, a network dedicated to debt relief and protesting corporate globalization, are two examples. The Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona, on the other hand, is famous for its work in the Sanctuary Movement, a movement in the 1980's that helped immigrants cross illegally into the U.S. in order to find refuge. Their Website now invites visitors to contribute stories about the movement that will be posted. Thus, the church is transforming itself into an activist archive. Visit these sites and explore what kinds of boundary crossing religious communities are doing, and how they are using cyberspace to do so.
Jacob Riis, "How the Other Half Lives"
In contrast to Riis's early twentieth-century photographs of the Other Half, current photography projects try to teach children from disadvantaged communities to take and develop their own photographs. These projects enable the so-called other to engage in self-representation. For example, study the site on Wendy Ewald's Literacy through Photography project.
What do you make of the project? How is literacy achieved through photographic self-representation? What kinds of titles do the children choose? Or does Ewald choose the titles? How are their titles different from Riis's choice, "Street Arabs"? What are the implications of metaphorically describing poor children who live on the street as "Arabs"?
Consult the Website for the Urban Institute. Use the site to do bibliographic research on the problems of homelessness and poverty, especially as they affect children, in the United States today. What appears to have changed or not changed since Riis published his photographs?
David Sibley, "Feelings About Difference"
Sibley points to "the idea of dirt as a signifier of imperfection and inferiority," implying that cleanliness and dirtiness become determinants of "the inside and the outside." How does this tie into his discussion of images of white and black? Do you find his argument here convincing? Sibley quotes Sander Gilman's theory that goodness becomes associated with control and badness with loss of control. What relation does this idea bear to the idea of exclusion? Search the Web for sites about the communities and identities that interest you most. Do you think that the Web is a place where stereotypes are being reproduced and spread, or is identity being constructed less in terms of dichotomy in online spaces?
Robert Berkhofer, Jr. "The White Man's Indian"
Explore some Web resources on Native Americans and culture. What resources reflect Berkhofer's analysis? Where do you see examples of the "idea of the Indian" represented? Where do you see it undone? What about sites put up by Native American tribes or tribal coalitions? How do they represent themselves? As particular tribes? As American Indians or Native Americans as a collective entity? How do these sites reflect the historical phenomenon of Europeans seeing Native Americans as the zero-sum of European culture? That is, do these sites address the historical representation of Native Americans as the negation of European culture?
Gwendolyn Brooks "We Real Cool"
This poem has been included in the U.S. Library of Congress's archive of Americans' Favorite Poems, a project by former U.S. poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. You can learn more about what poems people chose as their favorites, and get information about a video of a young man from Boston reading this poem, at the Favorite Poem Website.
It would also be interesting to consider Brooks's poem in relation to communities of writers who name themselves and define their borders in different terms than "U.S. American." Learn about other poems people are writing by visiting these writing communities in cyberspace:
Web Connections for Chapter 2
Many of the readings in this chapter work well in relation to the Web Research Activity "The Web and a Sense of Place and Community." You might read Erickson's piece on "Collective Trauma: Loss of Communality," but many other pieces in this chapter (for which we have not provided electronic fieldwork) will also connect to broader Web research. For instance, Elizabeth Bishop's "In the Waiting Room." Several readings in this chapter also fit well with "Identity in Cyberspace" and "Virtual Tourism": Margery's Garber's "Vested Interests" (on the construction of gender identity in relation to clothing) and Stuart Hall's "Ethnicity: Identity and Difference" (on the concept of Anew ethnicities" and descriptions of the travel and migration in his own life).
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