Sa'ed Atshan:	Hello friends. Welcome, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for coming. It's so nice to see so many beautiful faces.
	My name is Sa'ed Atshan; it's my second year as a professor in the Peace and Conflict Studies Program here at Swarthmore. And it's such an honor to serve as a co-convenor of this Aydelotte Second Tuesday Series. I had heavy shoes to fill because Carol Nackenoff, who is right there, did an amazing job in the fall. Thank you for your incredible work. And I'm very much looking forward to Peter Schmidt's talk, and I will introduce Peter in a second.
	But before I do, I just wanted to give a shout-out to, I don't know where is Pam; Pam are you here? Pam Shopshire who's been--"Shop-shure," like "New Hamp-shure"! I blame my ESL, my English as a second language. No, no, but I got it. So, Pam has been such a pleasure to work with in organizing the logistics, and helping put this puzzle together, which is a complex puzzle. So thank you so much, Pam.
	So, the theme of this series is "The 2016 ..."--right, we're in 2017--"... Presidential Election and Its Significance." So boy do we have a lot to talk about now, in terms of its significance. And Peter, who I think is very much uniquely poised to be able to share some wisdom and some reflections with us, he is the William R. Keenan Jr. Professor of English Literature here at Swarthmore, and currently again serving as the chair of the department. He's been teaching at Swarthmore since 1980, and he specializes in 20th- and 21st-century U.S. literature, especially poetry and fiction. But he has the pleasure of all kinds of other works, including the Arabian Nights, a personal favorite; poetry in English from the Middle Ages to the present; and black studies texts and theory. 
	His course titles are amazing; they include "Portraits of the Artists," "U.S. Fiction," "Modern American Poetry," "The American Literature Honors Seminar," "The Lyric Poem in English," "Short Story in the U.S." His poetry workshop, which students clamor to get those spots. And I've been able to finagle a few students into it, so. 
	He has also written or co-edited books on the poet William Carlos Williams, the fiction of Eudora Welty, postcolonial theory and U.S. cultural studies, and U.S. southern studies from the civil war to the present. He is currently working on a set of essays on 20th- and 21st-century fiction, from L. Frank Baum, Jack London, and Ernest Hemingway, to contemporary authors such as Ruth Ozeki, Gary Shteyngart, and Sandra Cisneros.
	He also exercises regularly at the Matchbox and he loves to cycle. He claims that that provides him with some semblance of sanity; I would argue that he's perfectly sane. And he also runs a blog, which is quite compelling.
	So the title of Peter's talk is, "The Words You Speak Become the House You Live In: A Literature's Professor's Perspectives on Politics." Please join me in welcoming Peter Schmidt.
Peter Schmidt:	Thank you Sa'ed, and Pam. Thanks so much for coming. I have mostly complicated and sometimes depressing reflections, but with the literature I think it'll be fascinating and moving and uplifting. At least I hope so. And I've added some slides for humor here and there, because I think that's also important to do.
	Okay. Politics. Schmalitics. Here's my gut response to the recent election: the term "politics" is derived from the word "poly"--can you all read this?--meaning "many," and the word "ticks" meaning "blood-sucking parasites."
	Now, seriously, we know elections have consequences, and unfortunately many of those can be predicted. And I sure hope that more people vote in 2018 than they did in 2016. The majority of people, in fact, of the various groups, did not vote there. Well, political scientists will also tell us that the chances of that happening in a quote "off-year election" are small, there.
	So, what do the arts and literature have to tell us about politics? What Henry Adams, who knew a lot about both, called "the systemic organization of hatreds." In a time when we are rightly concerned about fake news, otherwise known as "spreading lies," why not be wary of the alt-realities created by stories? Or even, of the long-view perspectives that fact-based histories can give us, because those are always contested, never absolutely clear.
	"Strong poetry is news that stays news," said Ezra Pound. And powerful stories give us a way of categorizing and diagnosing human behavior, including tyrannical narcissism. Its causes and conman disguises, its disastrous consequences. Think of Shakespeare's play Richard III, for instance. 
	Some literature, however, also evilly encodes, and even celebrates, humanity at its worst. I taught an honors seminar in Southern U.S. literature last semester, and the students in it had the extremely uncomfortable but instructive experience of finding white supremacist, racist scapegoating rhetoric rampant in some of the fiction that we read. Including Thomas Dixon's million-selling novel from 1905 called The Clansman, whose heroes are white-hooded knights fighting to save the United States from external and internal threats, including "cultural mongrelization," which is a term they used back then. My students learned the hard way that such a view of America's past and future was not only not ancient history, but, like a zombified Living Dead monster, now staggers once again across our cultural landscape of national politics, wearing an orange comb-over.
	So part of me, when asked to speak on literature and politics, especially after media coverage of a presidential campaign that normalized scapegoating, responds that Swarthmore should hold an interdisciplinary teach-in on how to understand the rhetoric and actions of scapegoating. The organization of hatreds in perhaps its most spectacular form.
	Have a study and discuss lynching picnics, and the commercially produced photo postcards of many who attended sent to family and friends. This is from 1910 Dallas; there's a man hanging in the distance, who was killed, and lots of people own it. These were very popular to send to show you've been there and as you can see, there's often a joke message inscribed on them. Such as, "This was a raw bunch."
	Lynchings are public spectacles, not things that were done in private. And they were kind of Black Mask, that required the miraculous images of whiteness resurrecting itself through the shared consumption of a destroyed black body.
	Add to our homework the reading of two terrifying short stories from the 1960s--one by James Baldwin and one by Eudora Welty. The Baldwin is "Going to Meet the Man," about a boy who is taken along by his father to be introduced into white maleness via a lynching, and the effects that this has on him years later when he's a sheriff during the Civil Rights Movement in the '60s; and Eudora Welty's "Where Is the Voice Coming From?"--that take us inside the mind of killers and accomplices.
	Welty's case, she makes us enter the head of Medgar Evers's killer, a fertilizer salesman with a pseudo-aristocratic name of "Byron De La Beckwith," who shot the civil-rights organizer Medgar Evers to death in the driveway of his new home in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1963. Welty's story imagines the killer ranting with indignation at a black man living in a new house on a freshly paved street, thereby proving that racism is what we call "intersectional." In other words, not as much about class as it is about race. Or gender and sex.
	We might then also discuss in this imaginary seminar the forms of scapegoating and othering most rampant currently, including on social media and in U.S. workplaces and communities. It would also be imperative, I think, for our imaginary symposium to juxtapose all that dark content with something that would give hope, such as a primer of readings featured in Swarthmore's peace and conflict studies and history courses, material that basically asks what can we learn from studying the failures and successes of multiracial social movements that have used nonviolent organizing to trump hate and push for progressive change?
	We might in that contest also look at the scene in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel that I imagine some of you know, in which Scout, not her father Atticus, without knowing any theory, and without understanding what kind of threat is present, shames a lynch mob into going home.
	We often speak of literature and the arts as cultivating critical thinking, and a mysterious event called empathy, which perhaps at its most intense form is what Aristotle defined as, "an audience catharsis identifying with a tragic hero." These experiences are somehow meant to cure us of our penchant for hate and fear. You'll note that on the face of it though, these two alleged outcomes or benefits from studying art or literature are rather in tension with each other. Critical thinking works by encouraging distance and skepticism. Whereas empathy depends upon engendering closeness. We imaginatively inhabit other beings and worlds. Inspiring us to balance each of those responses creates literature's tensile strength. I think it's not a weakness.
	Let's take a different approach towards critical thinking and empathy by considering how literature may guide us to think perceptively about universals, the things that we supposedly all share, as well as how we use pronouns such as I, you, us versus them, or we. As you can sense, these are highly politicized topics, for they all involve power: the power to name and the power to unify or separate.
	First I'll sketch some interpretive paradigms active now in cultural studies, and then jump to some case studies representing universals in the politics of pronouns.
	So basically there are three models for interpretation in contemporary cultural studies. The first model, cultural artifacts are seen as either overtly or covertly complicit with dominant power formations, persuading us eventually to assent to the status quo. This is also known as the deterministic or hegemonic model.
	Or, if works are understood as not quite being complicit, they're diagnostic. That's a crucial difference. They map and allow us the sobering sight of our own, or at least a set of characters', social embeddedness in their place and time. We can never successfully work to escape the ways we are complicit with or blinded by history, so this reading goes, though seeing how we can be entangled may perhaps be a painful necessary first step towards liberating ourselves from how we're blind.
	A similarly, mostly pessimistic point was made by Karl Marx, speaking not of a work of art, but of a historical spectacle when a pseudo-populist revolutionary, Napoleon III, in the midst of the 19th century in France, exploited economic inequities to rise to power. And here's Marx, on this moment: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. They do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. In such epochs of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battles, slogans, and costumes, in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language." And thanks to my good friend Braulio for helping me work with this passage out here.
	From where can a progressive vision come then, especially if, like Marx, you don't believe in a beneficent god governing the universe, much less human history? It has to come from a world elsewhere, an imagined space that cannot be fully controlled by the power relations in which you're enmeshed. But often, as in the failed revolt and then the coup d'etat in France in 1848-51, cultural and political history gives us imprisoning illusions of profound change, appareled in paltry costumes and borrowed language that Marx decried and diagnosed. 
	Pessimistic enough for you? Remind you of a slogan on a red baseball cap? But only too prescient, I think. And I know, I know, we academics are often accused of trying to Make Marx Great Again.
	The opposite cultural studies model, this is number two and I'm sure you're familiar with some of these arguments, it's that literature and the other arts provide transcendent or universal, eternal truths to help us question, resist, and imagine, and build that better world. We might call this the platonic model, for without Plato's ideal forms, which can't imagine how to change this fallen world. Plato's basic point is consonant with most of the world's religions, including Judaism. The novelist Cynthia Ozick, for instance, recently argued that literature is a zone of radical freedom, perhaps the last one we have left. For Ozick, literature's goal is also quasi-divine; this is a gorgeous quotation: "The goal of a writer is to light up the least grain of being, to show how it is concretely individual, particularized from any other."
	And to this is connected the Judaic prayer for strength to accomplish the sacred duty of Tikkun Olam, the repair of the world. Each of us is obligated in our way to try to heal the fabric of a world that's been rent by violence. For Ozick, writers should model in their works both how to understand barbarity and how to have faith that the work of healing can take many forms. Her concept of radical freedom definitely comes with obligations, responsibilities. But it's guardedly optimistic in ways that option number one by definition cannot be.
	And then the third dominant paradigm in contemporary cultural studies, here, I would call the "conflictual model." That strong art and literature place interpretive models one and two in a dramatic dialectical struggle that demonstrates an understanding of the social conflicts of an era better than that era understands itself. One influential critic, Terry Eagleton, calls this "the social unconscious" model for interpreting the cultural work that great art does. 
	Often, when a work is unable to resolve in its internal dialectic, that has the strongest influence on the future. Strong cultural artifacts aren't afraid of complicated endings, though they usually offer us some measure of hope even as in Kafka, it's only to have diagnosed a problem lucidly and mercilessly.
	In contrast, shallower art tends to favor endings that offer neat resolutions to all the problems that are driving the story. Resolutions that often seem dated, sometimes even a decade later. In general, as a cultural studies person, I definitely prefer and use option three, though of course it can't really work without a thorough respect for and knowledge of options of one and two, in the interpretive models there. 
	And one key mode through which the conflictual model of interpretation subjects supposedly universal truths to critical analysis, is its emphasis on dramatic irony, a key term that I'll unpack in a moment. A stimulating recent book exemplifying the conflictual model in cultural studies is this marvelous one, Carol Levine's Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, and Network. Each of those are different ways of thinking about form in her book. Understanding imaginative forms, not as offering unity or universals, but as rather a conflicting set of possibilities and narratives in contention with each other. And she provide lucid insights into particular authors and works, including Jane Eyre, a marvelous reading of Jane Eyre's opening passage. But also into politics, aesthetics, and how form matters in all of these, and why history matters and all of these must inform any understanding of form, there.
	And a shorter, more introductory primer in what I've called the third way of interpreting culture, is by Nigerian-American novelist Chimamanda Adichie. A fantastic writer. Also a marvelous TED Talk called "The Danger of a Single Story," there. And her quote is, "How stories are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power." If you haven't had a chance to see her TED Talk, it's available and totally worth watching.
	So, what's a famous declaration of a supposedly universal verity presented in literature? I'll have you consider one that my colleague Betsy Bolton may know a little bit, from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Spoken with all of the authority of the third-person narrative voice. This novel's dated 1813. It hasn't aged a minute in lots of ways. Okay, "It's a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." Now, is this a statement about all human society, that the author and the novel or promoting, or is that a misreading of what Austen is up to? This is where that concept that I mentioned earlier, dramatic irony, comes in.
	Certainly the heroine's ditz of a mother, Mrs. Bennett, believes in the universal truth just stated. In fact, the second sentence makes this clear, even though we haven't yet met Mrs. Bennett; we haven't had the pleasure of meeting here. It articulates this view but it changes it slightly: "This truth is so well fixed in the minds of surrounding families, that the rich man is considered as the rightful property of someone or other of their daughters." Boom, dramatic irony.
	If the first sentence focuses on what a single rich man should want, the second notes how neighbors consider his wealth their property to compete for. Instead of universality, Austen archly emphasizes self-interest governing supposedly fixed truths. And note, that's a decidedly less lauditory adjective than "universal."
	Her text then lucidly moves to explore the legal and financial reasons why families, especially those with no male heir like the Bennetts, are anxious for their daughters' fates and see the world through that lens. So-called universal truths may be grounded then, primarily in self-interest, and this is Austen's famous wit at work, her use of dramatic irony both hones our judgment and also makes the whole process of reading fun. There.
	Of course in the long run, Austen's novel does acknowledge less materialistic universals. Defects in both Elizabeth's and Darcy's character, prejudice and pride, must be modified in order for them to have more balanced characters, the prospect of a happy marriage, and a proper understanding of their responsibilities. Those governed by fixed truths, mistaken to be universals, are the novel's minor characters. The ones who never change because they can't. They're its comic foils, not its protagonists. Though Austen also proves without a doubt the sobering truth that such fixed types compose the majority of humankind! That's dramatic irony at work again.
	Furthermore, as my colleague Betsy Bolton has noted, Austen's novel also stages, in disguised form, a debate between Edmund Burke, the founder you might say of modern conservatism, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother one might say of modern liberalism and feminism. If Pride and Prejudice in the end vindicates the rights and the responsibilities of women, however it doesn't do so in an unqualified way. The wisdom the novel offers can only be earned through error, and through taking responsibilities for one's mistakes, something both its hero and heroine have to learn.
	These kinds of universal truths therefore are not known ahead of time; they must be discovered by trial and error and must always be open to further change. And some truths in literature and the other arts I think and dramatic and contextual; they're not universal or absolute. Indeed when a character starts promoting his or her truths as universal, watch out they're headed for a fall in most cases.
	This actually meshes better, I think, with our own experience as mortal, changing time beings. Do most of us interact with others better after we've experienced Austen? I hope so. But her mockery of hypocrisy and dogmatism, it should rub off on readers but it's not guaranteed to.
	But hopefully I've left you with a plausibly persuasive mini-demonstration that the best literature doesn't assert universal claims so much as offer us ways to explore and respond both emotionally and critically to those claims.
	Now to my other related topic, which is the politics of pronouns. In everything from poems to political slogans and memes.
	My first example, thanks to [inaudible 00:24:19], is from a recent email of hers that cites Martin Niemoeller, a Protestant pastor and anti-Nazi activist who was imprisoned in a concentration camp, but survived World War II. After the war, one of Niemoeller's talks, about the temptation to hide from evil, included this parable which has since become world famous. I've seen it often printed as a poem. Here's a shortened version: "First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade-unionists. I did not speak out because I was not a trade-unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew ... Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me."
	Note how this poem is not just about totalitarianism's murderous hunger, but also about privilege. The illusion that because the speaker is not one of those other identities, he would be safe in his universal one. Quote-unquote, in this case his German identity, without other adjectives or other markers of difference. The poem's voice imitates us-them thinking, or we could call "me versus all those others" thinking, and then enacts for us the dangerous real life consequences of such thought. Indeed it makes us very uneasy by showing us how the poem's speaker's silence ironically is complicit with murderous hatred, not in some safe space protected from it. That's dramatic irony again.
	And since its post-World War II publication, the influence and readership of this little Holocaust parable has steadily increased, to the point where it's now more familiar than its author, and it's entered our collective cultural memory as a meme. One adaptable to new situations, such as this tweet dated from January 2017: "First they came for the scientists." And the National Park Service said, LOL, no, and went rogue, and we were all like, I was not expecting the park rangers to lead the resistance. None of the dystopian novels I read prepared me for that. But, cool! Okay.
	However, just declaiming we are one, and will defend shared rights, saying we prefer inclusion over intolerance and walls, is not a magic wand. When are the universals, the we, the common ground we proclaim, false? Or too easy? Or actually covertly exclusionary? When do we create a situation where some voices are more readily allowed to speak for all and others are not, or are even seen as threatening? How often is that sort of tolerance inequity not even acknowledged, much less addressed? Double standards abound, and when our use of "we" does not acknowledge the profound effects on our language caused by systemic inequity, including racism and scapegoating, problems quickly arise. 
	For instance, Governor Tim Kaine could speak Spanish on the campaign trail and be lauded for this by much of the media and by many, though certainly not by all, voters. Yet if a Latino, or a Latina, vice-presidential candidate were to use the same amount of Spanish in campaign stops, a higher percentage of Americans I would bet would find this threatening. Why is that? I'll have some memes coming up shortly for us to debate and discuss, for that will allow you to ponder through on your own the messy politics of pronouns there, rather than just listening to me yammer on about it.
	But first let's look at some people who know a thing or two about language's pitfalls and possibilities: poets. They may help us sort through the tensions bedeviling any use of "I" and "you," and "them versus us" or "we," there. I'll focus briefly on four: Walt Whitman from Leaves of Grass; Langston Hughes from Let America Be America Again; Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric, which won the 2014 National Book Award for Poetry; and Audrey Lorde's statement "Poetry is not a luxury."
	So, Whitman's epic poem "Song of Myself," from his collection Leaves of Grass, the first version of which came out in 1855, celebrates a radically democratic we, an imagined community, as a challenge to the failures of American democracy at the time. This is the decade before the Civil War. Including for instance the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required that American citizens not impede law enforcement taking recaptured slaves and returning them to their "owners."
	Whitman's hero exalts in being a citizen of this imagined new and more improved republic. He was influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who about a decade earlier asked where were the great poets of American democracy? And Emerson said that such a poet must be idealizing, challenging their poems to be representative, in a way that flawed representative government at the time was not.
	So Whitman begins, "I celebrate myself and sing myself, / And what I assume, you shall assume. / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."
	Now, a conflictual model for interpreting these lines acknowledge that they spark debate. Some have called this opening a celebration of pure democracy, total sharing and equality, while others have seen it as a form of linguistic imperialism, and noted that there's an absolute difference in line two between who's speaking in the imperative mode and who isn't.
	There's another famous early moment from this poem, which is where he introduces the concept of leaves of grass, Section Six, as the unifying principle for his sprawling prairie-like, sublime poetics: "Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones. Growing among black folks as among white / Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the / Same, I receive them the same." It's another moment of radical community. Whitman not only envisions racial equality, but also celebrates American English's linguistic diversity. A wonderfully percussive concatenation of k sounds unites slang "Kanuck," for Canadian, and more formal English, "Congressman," plus the Algonquin word for an edible wetlands plant that thrives throughout the East Coast; there's a Jersey town named "Tuckahoe." And an abbreviated version of a West African name, "Cuffie," that was once commonly given to black males born on a Friday.
	And here is an instance from slightly later in the poem, of the democratic hero violating the nation's fugitive slave law: "The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside, / I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile, / Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak, And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him, /And brought water and fill’d a tub for his sweated body and bruis’d feet, / And gave him a room that enter’d from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes, / And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness, / And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles; / He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass’d north, / I had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean’d in the corner."
	Note how Whitman's democratic hero shifts from inhabiting all identities in some stances to more particular ones in others. Race is not named in this passage from "Song of Myself," but racial difference is everywhere present, I think, and there's a decent chance that the protagonist of this section should be imagined as white here. He's certainly a homeowner. Whites and blacks both involved creating sheltering spaces on the Underground Railroad.
	Here's what's universal, is the homeowner's respect for human rights, and how he uses the privilege of his freedom to help create freedom for another. Somewhat Christlike, he washes the man's feet and salves his wounds. And by the way I should add that for the majority of my students, the brute realities of slavery are so abstract that they have no idea until we discuss it why this man has wounds on his ankles and his neck.
	The poem's "I" knows that its own life, as well as the ex-slave, is also now endangered. That's why the firelock, the gun, is at the corner of the room. And don't ignore the revealing details about the two men eating at the same table, or the guest room that "entered from my own." Whitman's not just describing a floor plan, but invoking a version of the house we live in, or ought to live in. Where spaces of our difference are also interconnected with each other.
	Now, Claudia Rankine's sorrowful skepticism, in her book-length poem, Citizen: An American Lyric, 2014, serves as a necessary antidote to Whitman and Obama's often soaring rhetoric of American progressive inclusion. Remember, Obama used that rhetoric even while he was deporting and incarcerating over three million Latinos in this country. And we have to think about that dissonance. For Rakine, as for Tanesi Coates, we must acknowledge and chronicle the ways we are not living in a post-racial society. We're still mired in a most-racial world. For Rankine, pronouns like "I," "you," and "we" are contested spaces, open to us unequally. Some have the privilege of often assuming without contradiction that their experience of our democracy is representative. Others are reminded day-in and day-out that they're invisible or excluded, or threatening.
	In one episode of Citizen, the protagonist takes a journey to her new therapist's home, to which she's invited for her first appointment. However when the poet arrives, the therapist is clearly not expecting a black woman on her porch, and freaks out. "Get away from my house! It's as if a wounded Doberman pinscher or German shepherd has gained the power of speech." The woman then suddenly hears the poet protesting that she's the new client. "'You have an appointment,' she spits back. Then she pauses. Everything pauses. 'Oh,' she says, followed by, 'Oh yes, that's right. I'm sorry. I am so sorry. So, so sorry.'"
	Ben Lerner, in his book The Hatred of Poetry, comments on this moment. "Citizens concerned with how race determines when and how we have access to pronouns is among other things a direct response to Whitmanic and nostalgic notions of a perfectly exchangeable 'I' and 'you' that can suspend all difference. Whoever you are while reading Citizen you are forced to situate yourself relative to the pronouns as opposed to assuming you fit within them. There is both critique and desire here, a confrontation with false universality, and the testing of a possibility of a genuinely inclusive second person, i.e. you." There.
	Rankine's job, I would say, is to note these problems, to make us see and hear them and not turn away. It's not her poem's job, she implies, to give us a ready resolution. The incidents she is chronicling are all to familiar to some, and shocking to others, and to more resistant readers perhaps are merely taken to be something mocked or as something she made up or exaggerated. But Citizen is doing the tough, sometimes painful, work required of true citizenship, I think. Which is refusing to let us ignore these moments when democratic ideals fail. 
	Some of you may remember an image from early in Trump's campaign when in Springfield, Illinois, a woman in the crowd staged a silent protest by conspicuously displaying a book she was reading--imagine, an act of reading in the midst of a campaign rally--while sitting in the crowd, knowing that the image would likely get picked up and noticed on the video feed. Look at the upper right of the slide, there with the red. The book she's holding, you can recognize it if you know the cover, is Claudia Rankine's Citizen. 
	Now, comparing and contrasting Whitman's and Rankine's methods and goals, in some ways they reproduce retrospectively the assumptions of culture studies paradigm number two versus number one. That is, the belief in liberating ideals versus and insistence that the path to liberation first requires a stubborn look at our failures. In comparison, when we're feeling disheartened or exhausted, Whitman's optimism can easily seem fatuous. Yet can we really reject the hope that his poem radiates? 
	Aside, a phrase you've probably heard is a credo, "The arc of the moral universe bends towards justice." It was not coined by Martin Luther King, though King loved and used that phrase, but by a contemporary of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, a Unitarian minister named Theodore Parker, who was also part of the Transcendentalist movement. 
	A democracy without either of these two poets or their strategies would be morally impoverished, I think. And literary history works best with checks and balances. The same way that government does.
	And then, one last question here for you to think about. Are there poems that bridge both Whitman's optimism and Rankine's necessary pessimism regarding the American experiment? Or perhaps any experiment in making one nation out of many, which after all is the challenge for just about every nation these days, given global migration patterns. 
	No thanks.
	One way to make a pluribus somehow balance an unum in its force. And my answer I think is yes, and here are two instances. First, Langston Hughes's "Let America Be America Again," a poem you can find in its entirety on the internet; it's magnificent and moving reading. It's written in the midst of the Depression, in 1935, and now it's quoted all over, in times when people are desperate for feeling a sense of hope and to think that there's a different way of understanding America, making America great again, from one involving red hats.
	Hughes's poem understands America to only have made imperfect progress in forming a more perfect union, remember that's the key phrase from the Preamble to the Constitution. "Let America ,,, be the dream it used to be," says the poem's dominant optimistic voice. Yet this voice is constantly undercut in Hughes's poem by another, pessimistic Rankine-like voice, one that often mutters in parentheses, dramatic irony again, that "America was never America to me."
	And when the poem's dominant narrative finally asks, "Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? Who are you that draws his veil across the stars?" the poem's answer to these questions focuses not just on race, but on class, on the United States's unsolved problem of enormous economic and opportunity inequities threatening true democracy.
	It's worth adding that a broad spectrum of leaders at the revolutionary time, including Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and particularly John Adams, all worried about this issue of economic inequality undercutting democracy. Here's a slide from near the end of the Hughes poem. "I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, / I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars. / I am the red man driven from the land, / I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek— / And finding only the same old stupid plan / Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak."
	Here the poem's singular "I" voices are representative of many so far excluded from the universal America to be of the title. A different kind of universal, history's "same old stupid plan," obsessed with purity and exclusion, is called out by the poem in its last as the voice of a "gangster" America, that's Hughes's word, that must be defeated. The poem's dominant narrative voice at its conclusion is composed of a "me" and a "we" whose collective experience of exclusion, when America never was America, is now the empowered collective voice of the nation's future. The unum that will rise and redeem our imperfect past.
	And my second example of synthesis is from the Caribbean-American poet Audrey Lorde. Her essay "Poetry Is Not a Luxury," which may be found in Sister Outsider, 1984. I can't read the whole quote, but, "Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless, so that it can be thought, and our feelings become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference, but that that also will be created in a language that matches those feelings so that they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps us fashion it."
	Lorde invokes the architectural house of language theme of my talk as she searches for a necessary balance between defining difference and the sharing of strategic unities. She invokes Whitman on democratic citizenship literature, not as an imitation or reflection of the things as they are, but as a space of radical freedom, the ability to build both a house, or houses of difference, while simultaneously imagine a new "we" versus language that can be shared.
	Hughes's and Lorde's linguistic interventions create universals, but these are not platonic ideas existing outside of history, I think. Rather they embody a kind of shared commons, an imaginative community or house of democracy that we have to fight to create and struggle to maintain. These more contemporary models model my third way of understanding what great art and literature does, for it resists complicity, strives for agency, yet also gives us the courage to explore the really difficult stuff in which we acknowledge and work through our contradictory history as we try to meld our own conflicted stories into a larger narrative. A whole that's never perfect, never whole really, but does progress via a kind of one-step-forward, half-step-back stagger-step dance, a living story grounded in our living and revisable and amendable Constitution.
	This is my last paragraph. When common ground in a democracy is dictated rather than produced through struggle, such a situation can easily devolve into angry competitive assertions of separate difference, and continual wounding, a zero-sum nightmare of self-canceling rights and retreating into separate enclaves. In that scenario we're all doomed to perish, though some may go before others. We'll share only universal futility and isolation imprisoned behind our own infinitude of adamantine differences. And T.S. Eliot described the situation really well in this line from "The Wasteland": "I have heard the key / Turn in the door once and turn once only / We think of the key, each in his prison / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison ..." That prison is not the house we want to live in, but we will be destined to molder in it unless we work together via the language we speak and the deeds we do to build a democratic dwelling place of many rooms.
	Thank you.