Assignment 1 and 2: Waldstreicher & Chauncey Readings and My Research Topic by Sophie Chase

Assignment 1: Waldstreicher & Chauncey Readings

Sophie Chase

Waldstreicher

            Waldstreicher takes on a pretty substantial workload in his piece, “Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic.” Not only does he attempt to shed light on the development of a capitalist, mixed system of unfree labor in the mid-Atlantic as a whole, but also attempts to give a voice to a group of people that partook, more often than not, forcibly, in this system that commoditized labor. He does this by tracing the ways in which “runaways” – slaves, servants and other unfree laborers – navigated the system for their own benefit through self-fashioning and passing. He also attempts to shed light on the interconnectedness of the entire system of commoditized labor in the mid-Atlantic and how dominant players – printers, slave/servant owners seeking their runaways, etc. – kept the system up, often with much frustration.

Waldstreicher begins his paper first with a captivating “runaway” newspaper ad about Tom, a “mulatto” that “speaks good English,” and can “pass for an Indian,” among other describers (Waldstreicher 243). I think bringing Tom to life at the advent of the paper was a strong rhetorical strategy on Waldstreicher’s part. By getting an idea of what a runaway ad actually was and what it contained before Waldstreicher’s argument, I as a reader was able to better prepare for the argument, which at times could be very convoluted. Using Tom as representative for what he calls a “self-fashioner,” Waldstreicher argues that slaves like Tom were “actors in a world of goods, manipulating possessions and perceptions to make and remake themselves” (Waldstreicher 245). He argues that unfree laborers, like Tom, were part of a greater cosmopolitan system that commoditized labor through newspaper and print ads. Finally Waldstreicher argues that although slave and newspaper/print owners and their printing of runaway advertisements said something about the countering of the mobility of the unfree and attempts to reestablish confidence in slavery and servitude, they were also the first “slave narratives,” and say something about the acts of cultural hybridization blacks and racially mixed people committed for their own purposes (Waldstreicher 247).

I was pretty surprised by how many of Waldstreicher’s ‘primary sources,’ were from other secondary sources, whose authors had already collected and digested the material he also looks at. Most of the runaway advertisements Waldstreicher cites from come out of Hodges and Brown’s “Pretends to be Free” and other secondary sources. While I think secondary sources can definitely add to the background of an argument and should be placed in conversation with one’s arguments, I think one must be cautious when picking primary sources out of secondary sources. Since “Pretends to be Free,” appears to be a collection of primary news articles from this period, it definitely makes sense that Walstreicher looks here, but I think there is still something to be said for sifting through primary sources on your own, instead of only looking at preselected primary sources. Moreover I think it may be stretch to infer as much as Waldstreicher did about the unfree from newspaper ads alone. While I think he did find a creative way of going about giving a voice to unheard (and sometimes unseen) people, sometimes his inferences go a little far, especially in regards to the large overarching issues like commodification of labor. This argument for is really only based on one table that tracked the growth of newspaper advertisements in one newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette.

While overall Waldstreicher’s topic was particularly intriguing and his paper was fun to read, I think he bit off a little more than he could chew with what he hoped to accomplish in this amount of pages. Although I did like how he integrated anecdotes into his writing, I sometimes felt like he quoted excessively from secondary sources and from primary sources he found in secondary sources. As a result it sometimes felt as if he was merely writing a paper that put these different authors in conversation with each other. He did not progress to a new place and understanding as successfully as I would have liked to see. I think the lack of original primary sources definitely played a role in this as well. I think going forward I would like to use some of Waldstreicher’s rhetorical strategies (like the anecdote at the start), but use my secondary sources sparingly and purposefully so as not to convolute or lose my own argument.

Chauncey

            Unlike Waldstreicher, Chauncey’s purpose for writing and the narrow focus of his research was immediately clear to me. His focus is on the gay male world that took shape in New York City between 1890 and the beginning of the Second World War. Chauncey makes it very explicit where his research deviates from, adds or challenges previous scholarship. He makes an extremely convincing argument for why his particular research is significant. It is a field and time period that is still grossly understudied. Chauncey argues that the male gay world in New York City between 1890 and the beginning of the Second World War was not as widespread myths (myths of isolation, invisibility, and internalization) about the history of gay life before the rise of the gay movements currently paint it to be. Rather it was a “highly visible, remarkably complex and continually changing world” (Chauncey 1). Chauncey also takes it a step further to argue that gay life was actually less tolerated, less visible and more rigidly segregated in the second third of the century than the period he is examining. Lastly Chauncey suggests that representations of homosexuality and the language and terms used to represent it were not “inventions of the elite, but were popular discursive categories before they became elite discursive categories” (Chauncey 27). If proven, these claims not only have the potential to change the way we understand gay life prior to the gay movements, but also to assert a rightful claiming of identity by gay men in New York themselves.

            Looking at Chauncey’s bibliography and footnotes for Chapter 2 in particular, I can tell Chauncey used a wide variety of primary sources. The majority of the primary sources appear to be reports on dance halls, bars and speakeasies in New York interspersed with a few diary entries and correspondences. The rest of the primary sources Chauncey utilizes come out of Werther’s “The Female Impersonators,” a secondary source. I thought Chauncey engaged with secondary sources successfully in the introduction chapter quite successfully. He used secondary sources on post World War Two gay life in order to expand upon our understanding of certain terms and common lingo, like the phrase “coming out of the closest” and argues why a 21^st century understanding of these terms and where they fit in with identity is not particularly useful when considering the pre-World War Two gay world of New York. We should not map these assumptions on to this world.

            Chauncey’s writing style was clear which made it relatively easy to follow his arguments. I thought he integrated his sources well in Chapter 2, however at times he made claims and commentary on a subtopic before presenting his evidence, which left me questioning his references like on pages 60 and 61. The structures of his paragraphs were sometimes confusing as a result. I think going forward in my paper I will definitely think about the purpose of each paragraph and where it fits into my overall argument. I think in a multi-chapter or multi-part paper like the one we will be writing it is important to have an overall argument that ties everything together, but also sub arguments within each section. To do this successfully I will definitely need to very clearly present my roadmap up front and have clear and logical sections.

Assignment 2: Refining My Research Topic 

Sophie Chase

            I.     During World War Two women on the American homefront played an enormous role in wartime mobilization, particularly in rationing efforts and the production of food through Victory Gardens. Nevertheless the prevalence of the white, American woman motif in popular memory of the American WWII homefront often ignores the existence and experience of marginalized men and women, such as Japanese Americans and African Americans, who also remained on the homefront in large numbers during the War. Moreover it detracts from a true understanding of the roles and identities these marginalized groups (Japanese American and African American men, women, children, grandparents, etc.) assumed, shifted and challenged. This paper will concentrate primarily on Japanese Americans and African Americans that remained on the American homefront during WWII. It seeks to understand their role in American wartime food production, victory gardens and rationing efforts and the extent to which these efforts could be seen as something more important than simply proving sustenance for wartime mobilization. Although I hope this paper will ultimately say something about the experience of these two groups across the United States during WWII, my research will focus primarily on the experience of Japanese Americans in internment camps and African Americans in urban spaces during WWII. I think a comparison of both of these groups, who were both treated unequally and found their loyalties to the United States constantly in question, will be extremely fruitful.

         II.     When we think about wartime food production, victory gardens, rationing, canning and the Land Army movement during WWII, the image of the virtuous, white American wife whose husband was off at war is often what first comes to mind. Government propaganda, victory garden pamphlets and ads, and other material supported and even maintained this motif (most likely to boost morale and project a dominant, coherent and white narrative).  As a result it often easy to forget that other men and women, Japanese American and African Americans not only contributed significantly to these homefront wartime efforts. From the research I have done so far it appears that both of these groups of Americans contributed to wartime food production efforts, rationed and planted and cultivated victory gardens not just because the U.S. government called for them, but because they viewed food production, rationing and victory gardens as sites to further and expand upon their own causes. For African Americans it may have been Civil Rights and for Japanese Americans it may have been proving their “American-ness” to the Government or white Americans. Just as previous literature as shown how white American women used victory gardens and rationing (Cultivating Victory: The Women’s Land Army and the Victory Garden Movement by Cecilia Gowdy-Wydant) as a way to advance women’s rights in society and politics, I would like to extend this to other marginalized groups on the American homefront. In other words, African Americans and Japanese Americans used food production, cultivation and rationing during WWII not only to aid in war efforts, but also as sites to reshape and challenge  perceptions made about them on both an individual and national level and advance their own specific causes, whether it was in Civil Rights or citizenship.

       III.     My argument will add to a growing body of research on food and activism in the United States. While most previous scholarship has focused on food activism in the past 40 years or so with the 1960s and 1970s “Back to Earth” movements, activists have used food, most specifically its cultivation and production, as a site to make a statement and a mechanism for change. WWII is not really currently understood as a period of “food activism,” and my hope is my paper will argue successfully in favor of this. Moreover my paper will not only take an unconventional approach to understanding activism during WII, but will also focus on Americans often forgot when we think about wartime efforts on the American home front.
       IV.     I would like to begin by analyzing food production, cultivation and rationing in the U.S. during WWII. My hope is that a variety of government pamphlets the U.S. Government created to guide Americans in planting and cultivating their own victory gardens and ads supporting rationing and farming will provide a rich understanding of the American home front in which Japanese Americans and African Americans were working on. I would like to look at a series of diaries and camp memoirs written by Japanese Americans in internment camps, many of which secondary sources have cited Japanese Americans writing about victory gardens they planted in the camps and their working on mass scale farms that were incorporated with daily camp life. In addition many Japanese Americans created Japanese gardens in these often desolute and dry camps, which were productive and beautiful for sure but were they perhaps political spaces/sites of activism as well? I hope to look at photographs from the Sacramento State University Library’s Japanese American Archival Collection. I would like to look at a variety of resources for African Americans as well, especially African American newspapers like the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier and the Cincinnati Union in which prominent African American Civil Rights activists often encouraged African Americans to plant victory gardens and rationing. I would also like to look at public documents from the Good Conduct Campaign, an African American run campaign that supported African American involvement in rationing and food production during the War. I hope I can also uncover what urban gardens, which became popular among African Americans in Chicago, actually looked like and what was grown through cookbooks and magazines.

         V.     Ann Bentley’s “Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity,” and Cecilia Gowdy-Wygant’s “Cultivating Victory: The Woman’s Land Army and the Victory Garden Movement,” will both be a good place to start in order to provide context to food production, victory gardens and rationing efforts during WWII. I think John Jones” “All Out For Victory: Magazine Advertisements and the World War II Home Front,” will be particularly helpful in my attempt to understand how the U.S. government hoped to project these movements and encourage Americans to support them. Both Susan Pennington’s “Feast Your Eyes: The Unexpected Beauty of Vegetable Gardens,” and McMillen’s “Remaking Dixie: The Impact of World War II on the American South,” both provide a place to begin to understand the experience of marginalized groups in America during WWII especially through the narrow lens of food production, victory gardens and rationing. Although I don’t expect these two sources to provide a lot in terms of background on these groups, from looking at their bibliographies I know they will provide an avenue for locating strong primary sources.

Because my approach is somewhat unconventional and little bit obscure, I know I may have a little bit of a challenge in front of me in terms of knitting my sources together. Nevertheless I am excited for the challenge. I think I will also need to be careful not to assume the experience was the same for all African Americans and Japanese Americans across the country, although I feel food production, victory gardens and rationing affected everyone, because everyone needs to eat!