Joint Culture and Social Analysis Workshop and Conversations Across Borders: A Workshop in Transnational Studies

Date: 

Monday, February 1, 2016, 4:00pm to 6:00pm

Location: 

William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street, Room 1550

"Give the People What They [Ought to] Want: The Federal Writers’ Project, Provincial Diversity, and Global Uniformity in American Literature”

Speaker:

Wendy Griswold, Bergen Evans Professor of Humanities; Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University.

Discussant:

Michèle Lamont, Center Director; Executive Committee; Steering Committee; Faculty Associate. Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies; Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies, Departments of Sociology and African and African American Studies, Harvard University.

Contact:

Laura Adler
laurackadler@g.harvard.edu

John Arroyo
arroyojc@mit.edu

Chairs:

Michèle Lamont, Center Director; Executive Committee; Steering Committee; Faculty Associate. Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies; Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies, Departments of Sociology and African and African American Studies, Harvard University.

Bart Bonikowski, Director, Undergraduate Student Programs; Executive Committee; Faculty Associate. Assistant Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Harvard University.

Peggy Levitt, Associate. Chair; Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Wellesley College.

Jocelyn Viterna, Faculty Associate. Associate Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Harvard University.

Abstract:

The second volume of a trilogy on culture and place that began with Regionalism and the Reading Class (University of Chicago Press 2008), American Guides: The Federal Writers’ Project and the Casting of American Culture examines the politics, production, content, reception, and impact of the WPA’s efforts to employ white-collar workers. Launched in the midst of the Great Depression, the Federal Writers’ Project was a jobs program, pure and simple, and its directors – urban, left-of-center, Ivy League, Northeastern New Dealers – had no agenda beyond offering impoverished writers work and keeping them out of trouble. They came up with the idea of producing state guidebooks, believing these would encourage tourism, mollify Congressional critics, and convince the nation that the Project was doing something that was, in Frances Perkins’s oft-repeated words, “socially useful.” These State Guides had an immense though unintended cultural influence. American Guides focuses particularly on their literary impact. Its analysis of the almost three thousand authors discussed in the Guides reveals how they diversified American literature’s cast of characters in terms of gender, ethnicity, and geography, and how they institutionalized a formal shift whereby American culture now seemed to come in state-shaped boxes. Through their retention in libraries, continual reprinting, and use by students, the State Guides normalized ideas about cultural diversity long before such ideas became mainstream. The TSI/Culture and Social Analysis Workshop seminar presentation will discuss the foreign authors who were included in the Guides, the American ones who weren't, and the reasons for these local exclusions and global inclusions.