america adrift

I’m unplugging from the Matrix for week starting from now. Everyone else here at aa is presumably still around, although it is Autumn Break. As for me, I need to burn one down.

Ben Harper performing at Boonaroo about 4 years ago. Or was it five?

Lately, I have been preoccupied with a new research project that I am trying to work up into a paper for the next Nordic Association of American Studies conference in May 2009.

These days I spend about 10 hours a week commuting, which means that I get to listen to a lot of CDs. One of my recent faves has been The Street Was Always There, a collection of songs by American protest and folk singers from the 60s, all performed by Eric Andersen, who himself was a member of the Greenwich Village scene at the time. The disc contains songs by virtually all the great singer-songwriters of that era - with the notable exception of Bob Dylan. Most of the contributors I was at least vaguely familiar with, but some required intensive Google’ing on my part to get their back-story.

The first thing one notices about the circle of singer/songwriters in question is that almost none of them got out of Greenwich Village alive (and the few that did, did not get away unscathed) - with the notable exception of Dylan, of course: Phil Ochs hanged himself, Paul Clayton took an electric toaster with him in the bathtub, Richard Fariña crashed his motorcycle at 90 mph, David Blue had a fatal heart attack at 42, and Peter LaFarge died of a stroke, possibly induced by a drug overdose, in October 1965. He was 34.

Many of these untimely ends can be traced back to disappointments with the singers’ careers (most realized that Dylan would be the only folkie making a successful transition into superstardom) and disillusionment with the loss of the potential of the counterculture to change the world. Among the luckier ones who didn’t die young, but ‘merely’ went into internal exile were Fred Neil (d. 2001) and Paul Siebel, who both quit the music scene almost entirely as the sixties revolutionary spirit waned into the commercial twilight of the early 70s.

But I was particularly interested in why things went so badly with Peter LaFarge, esp. after I discovered that he had been involved, at the time of his death, with Inger Nilesen, a Danish woman who had come to the US to work as a stewardess in long-distance buses - a job which she had soon quit in order to work as a hostess in a Miami Playboy club, only to follow her love of folk music to Greenwich Village’s bohemian heartland, where she soon hooked up with Peter LaFarge.

In the case of LaFarge some particularly interesting identity issues must have combined to exacerbate his discontent, and yet he seemed to have everything going for him in 1965. His song “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” had been a major country and cross-over hit for Johnny Cash the year before. LaFarge was a bit older and more experienced than most of his peers, and had already been recording folk and sea shanty albums in the late 50s, so he knew the music business quite well. He had recently met Inger Nielsen, whom he publicly expressed deep affection for, she had given birth to their daughter, and had even managed to astound everyone, including LaFarge, by recording and publishing an album of her own on Folkways Records, featuring Danish folk songs. Why, then, did things suddenly go so badly with Peter LaFarge?

To trace this enigma further one has to look at the precarious identity construction at the heart of the story everyone knew to be Peter LaFarge’s: An Indian of Hopi descent, he had been adopted at age nine by his stepfather, Oliver LaFarge - Pulitzer price winning author of the novel Laughing Boy, himself a descendant of the nearly extinct Narragansatt tribe. After educating himself, Peter decided to try his luck as a rodeo rider, which he was nearly great at until suffering an accident that almost cost him a leg - after which he discovered a talent (which was mentored by folk legend Cisco Houston) for singing and song-writing, specializing in bringing the plight of Native Americans to the attention of a wider public  - after which he served in the US Army in the Korean War, before moving to the Village to take part in the growing folk scene there, hanging out with Rambling Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan, whom he took extra pains at keeping out of trouble - ultimately becoming as known for his talent as a painter as for his singing, and, to crown it all, signing a major label record deal with MGM.

Most of this rags-to-riches story, however, hinges on a string of fallacies and inventions (as uncovered by Yuval Taylor in the article linked to above) which LaFarge either actively created and spread, or at best did nothing to dispel. My paper aims to chart these ‘fake’ identity constructions and to read LaFarge’s life as a cultural text illustrating the twin hazards of aiming for cultural authenticity and cosmopolitan sophistication (esp. when one tries to do it together with a Danish-born ‘Playboy bunny turned folk singer’ as Inger Nielsen is often referred to…)

This project is still very much work in progress, and I have not yet had time to track down the recent documentary film on LaFarge which should give some enlightening background on his life. Nor have I yet been able to find out much about the later life of Inger Nielsen, other than discovering that she had at least one other child after LaFarge’s death. I need also to trace whether her record was ever reviewed in Denmark and whether she came back here to perform or to live… Help and info on such matters will of course be greatly appreciated.

During this latest “financial crisis” there have been some fascinating images which communicate possible alternative narratives to the daily press stories. The image above from this NYT article particularly caught my attention. Here, despite whatever giveaway, formerly known as the bail-out, “rescue” the Senate may approve on Wednesday, the message in this photo seems clear. We are staring down the abyss. Not only are we looking down the cliff but from this angle, we’ve already walked out past the ledge. This is the moment Willie Coyote realizes he’s about to free fall into oblivion.

More after the jump, click on image for better resolution. Continue Reading »

As you all must be aware, the great Paul Newman recently passed on. Katie McFarlane, a graduate student? at UEA has just joined the CM blog as their first contributer with a tribute to Mr. Newman, News: Remembering Paul Newman. Drop by and visit our friends across the North Sea “little pond.” They’re just a click away.

Banned Books Week is the only national celebration of the freedom to read. It was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. More than a thousand books have been challenged since 1982. The challenges have occurred in every state and in hundreds of communities. People challenge books that they say are too sexual or too violent. They object to profanity and slang, and protest against offensive portrayals of racial or religious groups–or positive portrayals of homosexuals. Their targets range from books that explore the latest problems to classic and beloved works of American literature.

Number 5 on the top 10 list:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

See Nicole Belle’s write-up here. As always, the C&L community produces a lively comment thread.

Be careful what you wish for. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I was an earnest neophyte feminist at Vassar, earnestly debating the meanings of feminism, sexism, and choice, I used to wish, earnestly, that we would have a political campaign that actually discussed these issues. And this year I finally got one. Sort of. Only the disingenuousness of the conversation we’re actually having is something that I, in my actual ingenuousness then, could never have envisioned. But democracy being what it is, and Republicans being what they are, it’s turned into something very twisted, indeed.

Who knew that French theory-hating Republicans would be such adept poststructuralists? Floating signifiers are everywhere.

by Sarah Churchwell.

I stumbled upon this terrific article by Sarah Churchwell while perusing MyDD, one of the largest progressive Democratic activist blogs on the internets. It’s also “cross-posted” over at the orange giant, Daily Kos.

I was pleasantly surprised when reading her name attached to this cross-posted blog post. Sarah Churchwell is one of our neighbors from the University of East Anglia’s School for American Studies. Her fascinating book, The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, was an early inspiration for my research on popular media constructions of Al Gore.

From reading the comments, Sarah is a “newbie” in the blogosphere. But this article has gone “viral” and has potentially been read by several hundred thousand readers already. Not bad for what appears to be her first blog post? Go read the rest of the article (the original post) at the Motley Moose where she’s active in the comment thread.

“CARPE DIEM IN BLACK AND WHITE: Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers” (by Camelia Elias)

One of the perennial discussions of the concept of the fragment and fragmentary forms revolves around the status of the fragment and the fragmentary in relation to a presupposed whole. Is the fragment a remnant of something broken? Something that has been detached from a unitary form, or a whole? Is the fragmentary that which fragments? Does it have agency? If we disregard these philosophical questions, we can have a look at regular domestic drama especially as represented in the media. We often say: their marriage broke, and it was his fault. He left the nucleus of his unit, usually composed of a wife and a set of two kids, each with a different gender, for a figment, or a fragment of his imagination, usually a blond bombshell. So the heart is broken (of the victimized wife) and the mind is confused (of the treacherous husband) – there is often a fragment of remorse in the act of leaving where the one who fragments the relationship is concerned. We find fragments of this sort everywhere, and films have been known to embed in their visual representations such aspects of realist narrative not only thematically but also formally. In fact, particularly in film, the fragment sells. In this context, one of the reasons for the fragment’s success is its negative energy. The more there is a hacking of relationships, and the more painful and dramatic the separation, the more our emotions heighten and we go with the flow. There is something cathartic about the fragment, and it goes really well for the viewer or the spectator if he or she gets to see the perpetrator of fragmentation punished.

In this paper, I’m interested in how fragmentary representations of bad, malicious, and evil relations relate to moral tales, and what happens to the aesthetics of the fragment when morality is embedded into it. The bastard had it coming, we say at the end of the drama. Then we go home and enjoy the illusion of our own wholeness. But all this happens at the level of content. Where form is concerned the story of the fragment is told differently by the producers of fragmentary tales. For the viewers, such fragmentary tales occasionally achieve a cult status. Fragmentation and the fragment are good. The fragment is aesthetic. It keeps detail in play with other forms.

Fragmentation is thus positively valorized. The more of it there is the more we can enjoy the benefits of realizing that there is more to life and love than moral tales. One need only look at various works of film theory dealing not so much with conventional Hollywood tales, but with what has been considered a breakthrough in film techniques. When Russian film theorists began to experiment with editing through montage and discontinuity in the 20s, everyone agreed that that was a good thing. For instance, there is no book on film theory that doubts the significance of fragmentation for moviemaking ever since fragmentation was taken into consideration at that time. Taking their cue from the language and practice of industrialism on its rise in the 20s and 30s such filmmakers as Eisenstein and Kuleshov borrowed the “assembly line” poetics in their methods. The aim was however to create unity of form out of seeming chaos and disorienting pictures. Poststructuralists today identify these concerns with fragmentation that modernist filmmakers had with the modernists’ anxiety induced by the fear of war and the fear of what was to replace old paradigms of thinking. In his Film Theory: An Introduction, Robert Stam makes this thought clear. Thus he says:

The montage theorists were also, in a sense, structuralists avant la lettre in that they saw the filmic shot as being without intrinsic meaning prior to its placement within a montage structure. The shot gained meaning, in other words, only relationally, as part of a larger system. In film, as in language, to paraphrase Saussure, “there were only differences”. For the practically minded Kuleshov, founder of the world’s first film school, the art of cinema consisted in strategically managing the spectator’s cognitive and visual processes through the analytic segmentation of the partial views. What distinguishes the cinema from the other arts, for Kuleshov, is montage’s capacity to organize disjointed fragments into meaningful, rhythmical sequence […] It was film technique, rather than “reality,” then, that generated spectatorial emotion. (Stam, 2000: 38-39)

Insofar as filmmakers today still employ and rely on ideas of fragmentation formulated in the 20s, I want to look at how variations of moral tales that aim for unity of effect are cast as ambiguous in the hands of film directors that prefer a minimalistic ‘modular’ and fragmenting structure for their films to epic forms. My example is contemporary filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and his film Broken Flowers (2005).

As the tile indicates there is breakage in the narrative of an aging Don Juan who upon receiving an anonymous letter from an unidentified woman that informs him of his having a son he never knew he had embarks on a quest journey that takes him across the country. This latter day American Don Juan, here named Don Johnston, played by Bill Murray, sets out to find out who of the women he nailed in his youth might be the mother of his son. He remembers five of them, one dead. So he goes visiting.

The narrative draws heavily on the myth of Don Juan, who after having scored a host of women has to pay for his sins. But while the narrative also draws on all sorts of other representations of Don Juanism, from intertextual references to Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and thus relies on a plot development that follows a traditional linear trajectory that has sin and fall in focus, in Jarmusch’s rendition the story ends with an open and undecided scene. I want to argue, however, that while Jarmusch makes recourse to all the elements of aesthetic fragmentation, he embeds a moral tale within the film which clashes with the poetics of the fragment as such. The fragment, particularly as we find it defined in poststructuralist studies, has a performative quality to it rather than just being a remnant. In its performative poetics the fragment escapes definition insofar as, more often than not, it is impossible to determine where it begins and where it ends. The poetics of the fragment is thus best understood in terms of its function, which is to say that we see the fragment as an act: an act of writing, an act of literature, and act of filmmaking (Elias 2004).

By the same token the fragmentary, insofar as it deals with that which remains outside wholeness, can be said to designate a neutral state. One of the best poststructuralist theorists on the fragment, Maurice Blanchot, has formulated the relation between the fragment and the fragmentary thus:

The fragmentary expresses itself best, perhaps, in a language that does not recognize it. Fragmentary: meaning neither the fragment, part of a whole, nor the fragmentary in itself. The aphorism, the proverb, maxim, citation, thoughts, themes—verbal cells in being further removed than the infinitely continuous discourse whose content is “its own continuity”, continuity that is assured of itself only in giving itself as circular and, by this turn, submitting itself to the preliminary of a return whose law is outside, which outside is outside the law. (Blanchot, 1992: 43)

Being outside of the law points to a logic of neutrality. This thinking of the fragment without the fragment[1], as it were, is something that filmmakers such as Jarmusch have been exploring.

Broken Flowers poses an interesting challenge in its dealing with continuing the line of narratives that invite an ethical assessment of relationships – even when there is no resolution in any of the five tales that are embedded in the larger framework of the structure of the film. This challenge formulates itself in the implicit question: to what extent can we think of morality without morality in the very act of thinking?

Among the many positive reviews of Jarmusch’s film, there are few that manage to identify the problem with morality as it is mediated by symbolic representations that have been overtly circulated in the media, particularly the myth of Don Juan. Here is what Robert Fulford has to say in his “The Jagged Edges” written for The National Post (August 30, 2005) on the beginning of the movie:

Murray’s character is watching The Private Life of Don Juan, a 1934 melodrama by Alexander Korda. We don’t learn much about that film from Broken Flowers, but Jarmusch knows his admirers will look it up as soon as they get home. So we have now learned that Korda’s story ends with the collapse of Don Juan’s erotic career, his public disgrace and his retirement from the ranks of sexual overachievers. We also know the movie failed, partly because the situation of the star, Douglas Fairbanks, resembled Don Juan’s. Fairbanks had become famous playing young daredevils, but in 1934 he was 51, overweight, somewhat bald and only five years away from his fatal heart attack. Disappointment, humiliation, the deterioration that accompanies ageing: Those were Korda’s themes, and on this occasion they are Jarmusch’s too. Murray, given the evocative name of Don Johnston, becomes the latest embodiment of the Don Juan myth, which has served Mozart, Moliere, Balzac, Goldoni, Byron and George Bernard Shaw (and that’s the short list). The shape it takes here makes an odd comment on current movies. Jarmusch may be the king of the independents, but on this outing he can be as heavy-handed as an old MGM warhorse.

This rather demanding intertextuality – demanding in the sense that finding out all the finer details for the possible interpretation of Jarmusch’s film requires some time on the internet – is to Fulford a waste of time. As far as Fulford is concerned, there are just too many unnecessary intertextual fragments in the film for what in his opinion are two unambiguously clear, and also rather lame, messages:

1. You just never know how people will turn out […]

2. An erotic life pursued thoughtlessly could well make you feel kind of sad.

There is, however, an odd contrast at work throughout the movie. As the narrative unfolds through sparse dialogue, we are meant to think of Don’s women as old flames, though seen from his perspective it is quite clear that he entertains no thoughts about these women at all. I particularly like the suggestion that the male protagonist thinks nothing of his past women. This interesting male perspective is however depicted against the background of a painful to watch women’s world. When Don goes to visit the 4 women, we find that they completely embody types: a hot but brainless blond widow, a hippy gone conventional and sterile, a lawyer gone weird, lesbian, and animal shrink, and a tormented and mad as hell biker. While Don is depicted as devoid of emotion, the women are full of it. Fraught with spent passions – in a male’s gaze women are always that – they all seem to have suffered negative consequences after their break from Don; in fact, they are all damaged in some way. In contrast, Don is merely apathetic, and lives a passionless, but not an unreflective life – in a male’s gaze men are always capable of cool reasoning.

And this is the point where one is tempted to say that Jarmusch’s moral tale doesn’t work. On a general level, the movie works because the roles are played exquisitely by very fine actors, but the implicit moral notion that if men don’t treat their women nicely they should be punished is not only out-dated but also problematic insofar as it seems to be out of step with the fragment, both at the level of form and content. Although we clearly get the message in a totalizing form, as Fulford points out, none of the 5 stories – of basically what happened to 5 women in the course of two decades – ends in any conclusive way. The only constant is that change is the constant. The women have changed, and so has Don. Content-wise the moral of the story is that one must get on with the story of one’s life, such as it is, and for better or worse. Thus in terms of content, there is an unmotivated blending of apathy, futility, and cynicism at the expense of form. More precisely, the movie recasts women in their age-old roles as victims – even when they are not. The movie also presupposes that what women want from men is the age-old form of total commitment – even when they don’t. The movie assumes that we are entertained by identifying with the universal human predicament (more male than female) of getting old and impotent – when we are not. As the viewer’s emotional capacity is more engaged rather than his or her cognitive capability, one tends to dislike the fact that Don, towards the end of the movie, is made to suggest that any man would or should or ought to get soft in his knees when he has the chance to mirror himself in a younger self. As he has lunch with someone he thinks is his son, he thus offers him a possibility to consider a human value in the form of a philosophical insight: carpe diem. However, against the background of what we have just witnessed, such deadpan advice – the past is gone, the future is unknown, seize the day – doesn’t work. As the young man runs into the future, and the women are left to stick to and deal with the past, Don alone is condemned to enact his dictum by seeing his own present presént itself to him as a kind of a ‘between-acts’ time. He ends up seeing every 19 year old that passes him by as a potential son. The irony is that the Carpe Diem philosophy is generally understood as a totalizing idea leading the person who follows it to a harmonious and continuous life. But the Carpe Diem philosophy is, actually, the perfect philosophy for a Don Juan insofar as it leads no further than the next conquest. It is also a perfect fragment as it fragments the present off from all other times.   

If we stay with the level of the content here, for a while longer, as that is the level which engages most the aim to create a unified narrative even as it unfolds itself against the background of unfinished business (or stories), we may grant Jarmusch a point when he suggests that whether one has children or not, they are not going to make a difference for the way in which one lives and dies. The more disturbing question, however, where the unproblematic propagation of the Don Juan myth is concerned is this: why does he have to suggest that when women grow old they turn weird and vengeful – punishing men by disclosing that their sons are not theirs or that they had some whom they didn’t tell them about, or that they aborted them because they could – men in their old age become intriguingly philosophical, and thus resourceful for the entire human race? The contextual Carpe diem here does not include women. On the other hand, and in spite of what the intention of the director might have been, such a portrayal of women works better on the formal level, especially when one considers the performative aspect of the fragment. Insofar as the underlying message is that Don ditched his women for their ‘fragmenting’ capability – women fragment whereas men unify, and this is seen particularly in the initial shots when we see Don stoically resigning himself in the face of his current girlfriend’s desire for separation – the representation of women as stereotypes becomes necessary. If the fragment fragments, and if women embody the fragment, then women by definition must be reduced to parts. Which is exactly what happens. These parts, however, go on to enforce a male dominated philosophy.

As Don gets philosophical in his attempt to ultimately grasp what the meaning of life is, he shifts allegiance and positions: the promiscuous Don Juan has turned into none other than the wise Solomon. The lack of enthusiasm which characterizes Don’s encounters with his earlier girlfriends enforces the atmosphere rendered in the Ecclesiastes: this too shall pass. There is here an interesting tension between the intended continuity in the biblical message of wisdom, ‘whatever you do, you’re still going to die’ and the fragmenting female power which has the potential to undo the world created for them by Jarmusch. As Jarmusch forces women’s potentiality through, Don’s world revolves around a middle space in which he is neither a father, nor not a father. Neither having a son, nor being sonless. What fragments the movie at this point is Jarmusch’s tampering with the law of the excluded middle. This interpretation is prompted by the fact that it is never made quite clear in the film whether Don’s girlfriend, Sherry, to tease him, sends Don the pink letter that he receives, so that he may snap out of his apathy and start assuming some responsibility in their relationship. Nor is it clear whether Don’s friend Winston, corresponding to the Leporello figure in Mozart’s opera, is not in cahoots with Sherry. If Jarmusch follows Mozart’s plot, then, this possibility is more likely than it is unlikely – in Mozart the subplot that involves some cunning twists and thinking is vital to the unfolding of the moral tale. Thus on a formal level, what Jarmusch achieves by instituting a state of fragmentation and ambiguity is a situation when Don is made to think of women without women in it, in his thinking that is. If Jarmusch plays his irony card here, one must grant him the brilliancy of his genius: if there is anything that disturbs the moralists, then, it must be the situation when one can be both/and, moral and immoral at the same time; simultaneously concerned and non-concerned, sentimental and pragmatic. In his recent study of Jim Jarmusch’s films, Juan Suaréz makes a similar point:

Jarmusch’s fondness of composite forms has been read against his fascination with Japanese cinema – especially with Kenji Mizoguchi, whose films occasionally takes the form of collections of stories. But a case may also be made for its similarity to some aesthetic procedures in Jarmusch’s immediate environment, where fragmentation and modularity are symptomatic of what contemporary philosophers were defining as the erosion of the great meta-recits of modernity and the concomitant need to refocus attention on the micrological and molecular, on punctual strategies and events. Also minimal are the blank affect and distended temporality of the film. Most scenes are devoted to inaction: to characters sitting around, listening to music or half-engaged in saggy, desultory exchange. These scenes are filled with “dead-time” – moments that do not propel the action forward, nor add information about characters (Suárez, 2007: 31)

The point here is that while the characters may emerge as rather flat, the “highly regulated game” (Suarez) of find and seek – son seeks father, father seeks potential mother – is mediated by fragmentary signs, such as the color pink which constitutes a leitmotif, leading men into temptation. While men fall, they don’t find anything.

The anticipation of a totalizing narrative out of a fragmentary form works in this film counter-intuitively: does Don get punished for his sins? Not really. Are women the victims? Not really. As Don is condemned to see signs in overabundance everywhere – which he is bound to misread because they are so many – the women are shown to be the better formalists – they are not into interpreting Don’s actions and their consequences. They create situations. Thus the fragmentary game in Broken Flowers invites the viewer to consider morality from a feminist perspective, where precisely the law of the excluded middle is explored more fully. In such a perspective, and within such a framework, one might infer that if the movie has a moral then it must be this one: that not all women that get ditched by Don Juans suffer from life-long mental affliction. Some blonde bimbos do become rocket scientists. Some brunettes do stick to Oscar Wilde’s dictum where some men’s intelligence is concerned: “Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable” (Wilde, 2004: 24).

References:

Blanchot, Maurice (1992) The Step Not Beyond. Trans. Lycette Nelson. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Elias, Camelia (2004) The Fragment: Towards a History and Poetics of a Performative Genre. Bern: Peter Lang.

Derrida, Jacques (2000) Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Stanford U Press

Fulford, Robert (2005) Review of Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers. “The Jagged Edges of Broken Flowers: Deadpan can only go so far before it’s dead boring”. The National Post. August 30, 2005.

Jarmusch, Jim (2005) Broken Flowers. DVD release: August 2006. Universal: Universal Studios

Stam, Robert (2000) Film Theory: An introduction. Cornwall: Blackwell Publishing.

Suárez, Juan A. (2007) Jim Jarmusch (Contemporary Film Directors). University of Illinois Press.

Wilde, Oscar (2004) The Decay of Lying. Kessinger Publishing.

LATINO/A USA: TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITIES / IDENTIDADES TRANSNACIONALES

Seminar at University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

Friday-Saturday, November 14-15, 2008

We are inviting 30-minute presentations addressing any aspect of the interdisciplinary field of Latino/a studies. We welcome traditional research papers as well as methodological considerations from multiple disciplinary, theoretical, historical, and geographic perspectives.

All proposals are welcome, but we are particularly interested in research papers that focus on transnational identities and fall within one or several of the following areas:

• Economic, social, and cultural relationships between Latin American and US Latino/a communities

• Social, political, and cultural interactions of Latino/as with other ethnic and racial groups in the US and in between different Latino/a groups in the US

• Cultural and artistic representations of Latino/a experiences

• Political mobilization of Latino/as in the US

Please email max 400-word proposals as Word attachment, together with one-page CVs, to Dr. Anne Magnussen, magnussen@hist.sdu.dk

by September 15, 2008.

Successful participants will be notified of acceptance via email by October 1, 2008.

We accept papers and presentations in both English and Spanish.

Selected seminar presentations will be published as part of a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Dialogos latinoamericanos in 2009.

This seminar is part of a series of activities organized by “Latinos: Migration and Transnationalism in USA,” a network funded by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities. The network is a collaborative project between researchers from the University of Aarhus (Ken Henriksen), Copenhagen Business School (Jan Gustafsson, Helene Balslev Clausen), and the University of Southern Denmark (Benita Heiskanen, Anne Magnussen).

(Newsweek, November 20, 2000)

I wrote this a few days ago but was unable to post it until now.

Benita sent me an email link the other day to the Obama campaign’s latest online fund raising video. In the video, Obama is wearing a strong red tie and Biden a baby blue tie. She sent me the link no doubt in response to my claim that Obama has typically only worn blue ties like the one show below throughout the primary campaign.

(Image from the Obama Campaign home page, 27 August, 2008)

So why is this important? Does something so seemingly trivial as the color of a necktie have any relevance to political identities and processes? The answer depends on how much weight one places on the associative and emotive power of color.

As we had been discussing recent visual rhetorical tools employed by different campaigns, I mentioned that the Obama campaign’s virtually exclusive use of blue, including the candidate’s ties are deliberate messages meant to communicate Democratic (and democratic) ideals. As I had been looking at Al Gore’s public image in recent years I began to notice similarities in Obama’s and other Democrat’s attire. Yes, I’ve really been “reading” political wardrobes.

For example, I’ve argued that Gore deliberately projected a “centrist” image during the 2000 campaign (and before) through what became his standard uniform; blue suite, blue shirt, red tie. As far as attire, there was nothing to suggest any difference in political or cultural ideology between Gore and Bush. Bush had not yet introduced the ubiquitous flag pin to his lapel. The New Yorker noted this through an editorial cartoon portraying a mock New York Times article with the headline, “Bush and Gore Stake Out Differences in First Debate, But Agree On Clothes.” The red (power) tie, especially since the early 80’s, came to symbolize wealth, conservatism, and of course power. Red is also the color associated with the Republican Party, blue with the Democratic party. In 1992, Clinton/Gore were also paired together in a similar red power tie uniform, perhaps reflecting their “new” Democrat pro business platform.

But today the color associations of red Republican and blue Democratic are arguably much stronger. Ever since the late Tim Russert coined the phrase “red state/blue state” during the 2000 Presidential campaign, it has become the norm to speak not only about politics in red and blue but cultural and identity ascriptions as well. The association between these two primary colors and socio-political ideology has become deeply embedded across popular cultural narratives. A quick Lexis, Amazon, or Google search will bear this out. If one talks about “red America” for example, they are inferring a whole host of cultural signifiers like 2nd Amendment, Christian, socially conservative, etc. The Newsweek cover above was not reflecting this narrative tradition so much as it was playing a role in its establishment.

Post 2000, national Democrats have increasingly employed blue in their attire and overall campaign imagery. Gore’s image over the last 6 years, which has typified the new Democratic political uniform, is meant to portray a Leftist public image drawing a deliberate contrast with the Republican Right. And no candidate during this (primary) election campaign has been more consistent than Obama, who has carefully branded and blue toned everything from his tie to his website. And it’s not just any blue. It’s “electric blue,” symbolizing not just Democratic political ideology but also democratic cultural values. It’s a blue that’s fresh, bright and hopeful. Just what Obama is pitching to the American public. It’s the Neo-Progressive blue of the new new Democrats. His acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention also made reference to this narrative with the following:

“The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America - they have served the United States of America.”

Light blue is also associated with health, healing, tranquility, understanding, and softness. This is what Obama proposes when he says not a red America or blue America, but a United States of America. But his visual rhetoric has been all blue. Contrasted to power red, which is also associated with war and danger, Obama and the Democratic party are actively portraying these contrasting values through color. At her blog, Cara Finnegan noted that, “Obama Blue ties” were the “male uniform of choice” for the Democratic convention. A very deliberate choice.

The new blue is the anti-red. It was probably no coincidence that Bush’s tie wardrobe was replaced with baby blue after most Americans grew tired of his Middle East adventure and his poll numbers plummeted. John McCain likewise, looking for some extra media attention during the Democratic convention appeared on Jay Leno wearing a soft blue tie. He was similarly attired during his announcement and presentation of his running mate. Increasingly, McCain is ditching the tie all together. His homepage features him in an open collar plain blue shirt. No doubt an attempt to communicate “blue collar” working class in lieu of the recent press coverage about not only how many houses he owns but his not being able to remember how many.

So why would Obama, after consistently portraying himself and his message in shades of blue, now don the red power tie? My first instinct was to think about those ever elusive “centrist” voters and Obama’s strategy which aims to compete (and hopefully win) in “red America.” Perhaps it is simply General Election mode to don the red power tie for a national public.

Looking around I found other images of Obama with red tie coupled with Biden in blue. During the primaries however, every endorsement event (that comes to mind) featured Obama with xyz in matching electric blue ties. See for example, An Uncanny Convention(al) Photo. Can you name a convention speaker who hasn’t donned the true blue?

With Biden brought on in part to “balance” Obama’s perceived experience deficit coupled with the age difference between the two men, it makes since for Obama to wear the power tie when they are paired. Obama needs to be perceived as the CEO or “the boss” when they are together. But given this logic, what color strategy should Obama employ in the debates with John McCain? Does he go with blue for healing and democratic solidarity or red to signify strength and power? I’m guessing the later. Again, for his acceptance speech last night Obama donned the red tie. I think Josh Marshall’s initial thoughts on Obama’s speech reflects the visual logic of the change in necktie color.

I’ve heard a few people say that he seemed to hold back from giving the soaring speech he might have given. But I suspect that was intentional and I think a good decision. Meta-themes and tonality form the deeper structure of political communication. And the aim of this speech was not eloquence but strength.

The meta-theme of Obama’s candidacy has been expressed throughout in shades of blue; change and hope, healing and unity. But I agree with Marshall’s assessment of the logic of the speech. Obama’s performance certainly achieved that. Thus, the convention’s visual presentation, with Obama in a red tie surrounded by a sea of “progressive blue,” captured the essence of the campaign narrative which Obama leads. A necktie is not only a clothing accessory but a rhetorical device. In this sense, the necktie is transformed into a mouthpiece.

Update: When comparing the two conventions I think my basic premise holds up. Both parties and candidates are engaged in an ideologically driven primary color narrative. See this photo essay for an idea of how the GOP is branding their convention in red. For his address, the virtual megatron Bush wore progressive blue, symbolizing his “compassionate conservatism.” Also I noticed that when the ex-Democrat Lieberman spoke, the backdrop behind him faded from red to blue. The sea of blood red signs on the convention floor that read “service” were particularly disturbing.

John McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis summed it up, “This election is not about issues,” said Davis. “This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.”

Photograph by Matt Stoller