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Archive for the ‘Communication’ Category

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The Place of Miscegenation Laws within Historical Scholarship about Slavery

In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Communication, Economics, History, Law, Laws of Slavery, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Nineteenth-Century America, Politics, Slavery, The Literary Table, Thomas Jefferson, Western Civilization on May 17, 2011 at 8:28 am

Allen Mendenhall

The following post appeared at The Literary Table.

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Miscegenation laws, also known as anti-miscegenation laws, increasingly have attracted the attention of scholars of slavery over the last half-century.  Scholarship on slavery first achieved eminence with the publication of such texts as Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944), Frank Tannenbaum’s Slave and Citizen (1946), Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution (1956), Stanley Elkins’s Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959), and Leon F. Litwack’s North of Slavery (1961).  When Winthrop D. Jordan published his landmark study White Over Black in 1968, miscegenation statutes during the era of American slavery were just beginning to fall within historians’ critical purview.  The Loving v. Virginia case, initiated in 1959 and resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967, no doubt played an important role in activating scholarship on this issue, especially in light of the Civil Rights movement that called attention to various areas of understudied black history. 

In Loving, the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s miscegenation statutes forbidding marriage between whites and non-whites and ruled that the racial classifications of the statutes restricted the freedom to marry and therefore violated the Equal Protection Clause and Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.  In the wake of Loving, scholarship on miscegenation laws gained traction, although miscegenation laws during the era of American slavery have yet to receive extensive critical treatment.  Several articles and essays have considered miscegenation laws and interracial sex during the era of American slavery, but only a few book-length analyses are devoted to these issues, and of these analyses, most deal with interracial sex and miscegenation laws in the nineteenth-century antebellum period, or from the period of Reconstruction up through the twentieth-century.  This historiographical essay explores interracial sex and miscegenation laws in the corpus of historical writing about slavery.  It does so by contextualizing interracial sex and miscegenation laws within broader trends in the study of slavery.  Placing various historical texts in conversation with one another, this essay speculates about how and why, over time, historians treated interracial sex and miscegenation laws differently and with varying degrees of detail.  By no means exhaustive, this essay merely seeks to point out one area of slavery studies that stands for notice, interrogation, and reconsideration.  The colonies did not always have miscegenation laws; indeed, miscegenation laws did not spring up in America until the late seventeenth-century, and they remained in effect in various times and regions until just forty-four years ago.  The longevity and severity of these laws make them worthy our continued attention, for to understand miscegenation laws is to understand more fully the logic and formal expression of racism. Read the rest of this entry »

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Writing, Workshopping, Emulation

In Arts & Letters, Communication, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Legal Research & Writing, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Teaching, Writing on May 13, 2011 at 9:49 am

Allen Mendenhall

I remember trying to write a paper for my high school English class and sitting in the library for what seemed like hours, looking at my blank sheet—we didn’t use laptops in those days—and thinking, “How am I going to write six pages about this book.”

The book was Wuthering Heights, and I was, I think, sixteen.  I had written papers before, but never one this long.  I was stuck.  I had writers’ block.  All I could think about was thinking about finishing the paper as soon as possible.

Eventually, I jotted down something that led to something else that led, in turn, to something else, which became the bulk of my paper.  I don’t remember what my paper was about, or the grade I received for my efforts.  All I remember was the panicked moment in the library when that blank-white paper stared back at me and seemed to demand that I fill it with words.

I was angry because I felt helpless.  My high school “not-gonna-do-it” attitude was much like the attitudes I sense in my college students.  Frustrated, I convinced myself that I didn’t need to write about Wuthering Heights because the book was old or for girls or whatever.  The problem was, I liked the book and wanted to write about it.  I just couldn’t.

“If we are going to teach our students to need to write,” remarks James A. Reither, “we will have to know much more than we do about the kinds of contexts that conduce—sometimes even force, certainly enable—the impulse to write.”

Reither is spot on.

Today, I can hardly restrain my impulses to write.  I write all the time.  I feel that I’m always learning how to write—and to write better.

What happened between my junior year of high school and today?  I can’t reduce the explanation to a single cause.

The best answer is probably that many things happened between then and now, each of them influencing me in some way.

As Reither claims, “writing processes and written products are elements of the same social process,” by which he means the social process of immersing ourselves in discourse communities and becoming fluent in the language and cultures of our audience.  Writing is not easy.  It involves repetition, experiment, experience, and mimesis.

Reither submits that “[m]ost of us learned to do what we do on our own—perhaps in spite of the courses we took—and some students continue to do the same.”

In college, I read unassigned essays just to get a feel for how authors conveyed their thoughts and feelings, for how they punctuated their sentences and toyed with syntax.  I underlined vocabulary that I wanted to use in my own papers.  I suppose this method of learning could be called emulation.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Wallace Stevens and Imagination

In Arts & Letters, Communication, Communism, Conservatism, Creative Writing, History, Imagination, John William Corrington, Literary Theory & Criticism, Pragmatism, Rhetoric, Santayana, Wallace Stevens, Western Civilization, Writing on May 4, 2011 at 10:54 pm

Allen Mendenhall

This post first appeared here at themendenhall.

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It would seem at first blush that American modernism is incompatible with American conservatism.  But this impression pivots on a too-narrow conception of both “modernism” and “conservatism.”  The aesthetes who animated modern American poetry were, many of them, social and political conservatives.  This fact has been lost on those intellectuals who do not admit or acknowledge alternative and complicating visions of the world in general and of modernism in particular.  In the wake of the radical 1960s, many intellectuals simply ignored the contributions of the conservative imagination to literature, preferring to will away such unpalatable phenomena by pretending they do not exist.  However well-meaning, these intellectuals either assume without much hesitation or qualification that all modernist theories and practices were progressive, or they brush under the rug any conservative tendencies among writers they admire.  American modernism was progressive in its adaptation of forms, but it does not follow that avant-garde aesthetics necessarily entails progressive political programs.  Nevertheless, under Frankfurt School and Marxist auspices, among other things, the literati and others in the academy have rewritten the history and thought of modernist American poetry to purge it of all conservative influence.  George Santayana, Allen Tate, T.S. Eliot, Yvor Winters, Marianne Moore—these individuals, according to progressive mantras, were intellectually challenging and therefore, the argument goes, politically leftist.  Such revisionism will not do. Read the rest of this entry »

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Law and the Ordinary, by Alexandre Lefebvre

In Arts & Letters, Communication, Jurisprudence, Law-and-Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism, News and Current Events, Politics, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Writing on April 13, 2011 at 10:32 pm

Allen Mendenhall

One of my favorite journals, Telos, has published an essay that might interest readers of this site.  The essay, by Alexandre Lefebvre, is titled “Law and the Ordinary: Hart, Wittgenstein, Jurisprudence.”  Here is the abstract:

This essay argues that H. L. A. Hart’s concept of jurisprudence in the first chapter of The Concept of Law is strongly influenced by the relationship that Wittgenstein establishes between ordinary and metaphysical language. The article is divided into three sections. The first section shows how jurisprudence emerges as a denial of ordinary language in its pursuit of a definition of law. The second section traces Hart’s use of ordinary language to identify idleness or emptiness in jurisprudence. The third section presents Hart’s conception of his work as therapeutic in its attempt to lead jurisprudence back to the everyday.

Telos is one of the few literary-theoretical journals that regularly challenges the critical and political orthodoxy that pits itself, ironically, as the unorthodox, progressive, or transgressive.

Indeed, Telos seriously considers repressed, unpopular, and unapproved thoughts and theories. It complicates “conservative” and “liberal” as meaningful categories of discourse.

Having published such controversial authors as Paul Gottfried, Clyde Wilson, Alain de Benoist and others who situate themselves on the right-wing of the political spectrum, Telos is committed to contemplation and speculation, to profound and difficult ideas and not fashionable or typical recitations of mainstream opinions.

The journal has a long history of interrogating and revising critical theory and critiquing culture and society, and it continues to publish notable scholarship in traditions both left and right, although the signifiers left and right are not useful starting points from which to analyze anything that appears in this journal.

Paul Piconne was the founder and long-term editor of Telos.  Piconne died in 2004.  Today the editor is Russell A. Berman.  The only publication as daring and interesting as Telos is Counterpunch, a political newsletter and not an academic journal.  I urge readers of this site to read both Telos and Counterpunch as often and as closely as possible.

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Doug Brent on Reinventing WAC (Again)

In Arts & Letters, Communication, Information Design, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication on March 9, 2011 at 5:38 pm

Allen Mendenhall

Doug Brent’s “Reinventing WAC (Again)” argues that WAC pedagogy complements the first-year experience and the related first-year seminar, which shares WAC’s goal of interactivity and cross-disciplinarity.

The author describes the direction that first-year seminars have taken, paying special attention to how they have initiated students into research discourse and culture.  He suggests that these seminars, like WAC pedagogy, emphasize process- and inquiry-based teaching methodologies.

First-year seminars—and in particular the academic-content seminar as opposed to the thematic seminar—are styled to facilitate student participation and engagement.  They encourage students to generate and not just absorb knowledge.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Literature and the Economics of Liberty

In Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Book Reviews, Communication, E.M. Forster, Law-and-Literature, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism on February 5, 2011 at 10:53 pm

Allen Mendenhall

Recently Jeffrey Tucker, editorial vice president of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, interviewed me about capitalism, the free market, and literature.  We discussed, among other things, Marxism in literature and humanities departments.  Just days later, a review titled “Marx’s Return” appeared in the London Review of Books.  That shows how relevant my interview was and is.  The interview is below:

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On My Teaching

In Arts & Letters, Communication, Information Design, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Writing on January 10, 2011 at 8:05 am

Allen Mendenhall

Everything is an argument.  I say that not because I’m a lawyer, but because all writing has a rhetorical purpose.  Poets have reasons for writing what they write, just as technical writers have reasons for writing what they write.  Poets have audiences; technical writers have audiences.  What distinguishes poetry from technical writing, or from any kind of writing for that matter, is audience expectation, or, in a word, genre.  Students in my classroom quickly learn that all writing has a purpose that usually, though not always, has to do with audience.  They learn to anticipate audience by contextualizing writing.  A brief for a judge, for example, serves a different purpose than an expository essay, and thus a “good” brief will look different from a “good” creative narrative.  A short story by Toni Morrison may be good writing, but it does not fit the needs of a peer-reviewed academic journal because the audience and genre do not match.  A crucial process of writing therefore involves understanding cultural and social interaction and their relation to discourse communities.  Communication, after all, is participatory and not unilateral.  It is the transmission of information from one source to another through particular media such as language.  The receiver or reader is as important to writing as the sender or writer.          Read the rest of this entry »

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Jurisprudence: East vs. West or East and West?

In Arts & Letters, Communication, E.M. Forster, Eastern Civilizaton, Islamic Law, Jurisprudence, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Literary Theory & Criticism, Pedagogy, Politics, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Western Civilization, Writing on December 29, 2010 at 6:53 pm

Allen Mendenhall

Today in the Malaysia Star, Shad Saleem Faruqi published “In law, West is not really best,” an article arguing that the fundamental paradigms of legal pedagogy in Malaysia remain Western.  Faruqi laments this fact and declares that despite years of experimentation, legal education “today is as much a colonial construct as it was during the days of the raj.”  Read the rest of this entry »

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Drafting and Revision

In Communication, Information Design, Legal Research & Writing, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Writing on December 21, 2010 at 10:45 am

In their article “Drafting and Revision Using Word Processing by Undergraduate Student Writers,” Anish M. Dave and David R. Russell attempt to refigure theories of drafting and revision in light of technological advances altering writing processes since drafting and revision became touchstones of composition pedagogy in the 1980s.

Process pedagogy prizes drafting and revision.  Since its inception, however, process pedagogy has undergone many changes.  Composition scholars and teachers have institutionalized the once novel and controversial process pedagogies; and subsequent trends—referred to as post-process pedagogies—have called into question several premises of the process movement.

The authors of this piece rethink concepts of drafting and revision by researching empirical data about pre-computer and computer eras of writing.  Presupposing that drafting and revision demand social as well as cognitive theoretical frameworks, the authors show that research in the late 1980s and early 1990s tended to dismiss word processing as ineffective or irrelevant to the revision process.  Studies from these years also suggest that multiple drafts benefited students, that students preferred hard-copies to computer screens, and that students viewed concepts of “drafts” differently than they do today.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Joan Richardson on Emerson, the Pragmatist

In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Communication, Creative Writing, Information Design, Literary Theory & Criticism, Pragmatism, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Semiotics on December 9, 2010 at 9:22 pm

If pragmatism is, as Joan Richardson claims, “thinking about thinking” (79), and if Emerson is, as Richardson claims, a pragmatist, then we might ask ourselves what intellectual tradition Emerson appears to appropriate and modify.  What are Emerson’s “moving pictures” (the title of Richardson’s chapter on Emerson), and how do they receive and transmit thought and theory?  Richardson seems to suggest that, for Emerson as for Jonathan Edwards, nature and imagination are mutually reinforcing and inextricably tied concepts.  Emerson works out of Edwards’s paradigms while altering them to fit his own historical moment.  Emerson mimics not only Edwards’s intellectual framework—his theories—but also Edwards’s diction and syntax (63).  Put differently, Emerson imitates a concept while imitating the vocabularies through which that concept passed down to him. 

What makes Edwards and Emerson unique is their turn to nature to make sense of the “transcendent.”  Just as Edwards looks to spiders and light to aestheticize his theology and exhilarate his congregation, so Emerson looks to nature to spiritualize the human mind.  Both men observe and then internalize the natural world to refine their thinking about thinking.  For Emerson, however, the human mind is itself an organism—one hungry for knowledge.  The mind is not so much “the room of the idea” as it is a living being with an appetite for thought (67).  Emerson employs and seeks out metaphor to organize this thought—one might say to satiate his ravenous intellectual appetite—and he does so because he realizes “the seminal role played by image” (68).  The world, for Emerson, is full of semiotic possibility, and one can arrive at truths about reality through the study of metaphor.  Science, after all, uses signs and symbols—i.e., metaphors—to test and decode the natural world (see, e.g., Richardson on the “metaphor intrinsic to biology’s emergence as a distinct field”) (69).     Read the rest of this entry »