Trans-Digital American Studies: Blogging without Borders

By Stuart Towner Noble, Center for American Studies University of Southern Denmark

In November 2006, I launched the Atlantic Community, my third blog since joining the blogosphere in 2002 when it was still in its infancy. My initial goal was to create a space where I and other students and academics living in Europe, and principally Denmark, could share our reflections on America from afar. The subtitle says it all, “Transatlantic perspectives on America.” Before enrolling in the graduate program in American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark, I had spent the last 15 years living a transatlantic existence, splitting my time between various European countries and the United States. I set out to apply a transatlantic perspective to both my graduate studies and the Atlantic Community. After reading David Nye’s article, "American Studies in Stereo: Nordic Perspectives," the idea of a conscious creolilzation of academic identity and inquiry further added to the Atlantic Community’s conceptualization. If America and Europe represented left and right speakers, then the Atlantic Community would provide amplification.

So I set up the blog, which was the easy part, and thus began my new online project in progress. I felt like Henry David Thoreau embarking upon Walden, “I went to the web because I wished to write digitally.” It began as not much more than random postings and short commentaries for literally a handful of readers (mostly personal friends) in the States. Over the course of a few semesters, the site would reflect course work, research and often continue class discussions into the digital ether.

While we don’t yet compete with The New Republic for readership, the site is growing, averaging 200 visitors a month with approximately 50% of the traffic from Denmark. The most trafficked blog post to date has been, “How to Caucus in Iowa.” I suspect most of the traffic to that article had far less to do with my ideas about John Edward’s disintermediating strategies” and more to do with people simply looking for information on how to Caucus. Most of the traffic after all was generated from Google searches originating in Iowa.

Not only is the site traffic growing but so too is the “community” aspect of the Atlantic Community. Bent Sørensen, Associate Professor of English at Aalborg University has contributed a few great articles. His latest post, “Robert Gibbons” is now the second most viewed blog post on the site. Camelia Elias, Associate Professor of American Studies at Roskilde University joined us with “Exiled Writing, Translated Knowledge: Andrei Codrescu’s Inroads.” This article is also available on her own home page, listed as a pre-publication linking back to the Atlantic Community. Her article is the third most viewed post on the site. I feel fortunate to have their contributions. The website traffic statistics reveals that so too are our readers. The Atlantic Community is looking forward to welcoming additional voices in February including Anne Dvinge and Steen Christiansen.

Future plans include a new homepage design and individual profile pages for each of our contributors which will provide a platform for promoting individual scholarship. Additionally, more powerful self-publishing tools will allow for richer content and quicker formatting. I am also looking into new social networking tools and strategies to further promote the site and our contributors.

There is no shortage of ideas as to what academic blogging is or should be. Sean-Paul Kelly, a personal friend and founder of a popular economics and foreign affairs blog, the Agonist, told me blogging is unique because of the reverse-chronological format of the technology. “Blogging is in the moment much more so than other forms of writing.” Their contributors include an assortment of experience from the financial industries, academia, journalism and law. The strength of the Agonist is the collective process by which knowledge and writing is produced and shared. Public Reason, a group blog for 9 Atlantic Community political philosophers and theorists, exists “to create an open forum for the academic political philosophy and theory community where we can discuss our common work.” The forum is open in that anyone can access the site, as it’s on the World Wide Web. Only, “professional academic political philosophers and theorists are invited to join.” I spend a little time there peering in from the outside. Crooked Timber, one of the oldest academic blogs, and one of my favorites, is markedly political and engages with a much broader audience beyond the academy. The content ranges from esoteric to comical, deeply engaging to playful. Crooked Timber ranked in Technorati's Top 100 blogs between 2003 and 2005.

Blog communities develop both within a group blog like the , and as part of the larger blogosphere. David Nye recently started his own blog, After the American Century. Thomas Smith, who lectures at the University of East Anglia, heads their group blog, American Studies: University of East Anglia. We link to each others' websites and together form the nascent “American Studies Blogosphere.”

Brad DeLong, a long time blogger and economics professor at Berkeley describes the academic blogosphere as a kind of Invisible College. I think DeLong’s idea of an invisible college reflects not so much that the academic blogosphere is obscured in darkness, but rather traditional spatial structures and temporal limitations do not exist online. For me, I think of academic blogging akin to a university sponsored workshop or seminar which is open to public participation. The Atlantic Community perhaps means different things to different people. But I think, as a form of writing and publishing my philosophy of blogging favors process over product, conversation over authorship, community over institution. Our mission statement reads;

The Atlantic Community, a project-in-development, is a collaborative weblog and network for research, analysis and commentary on American society and culture. Our aim is to provide a public voice for European scholarship in American Studies, forging stronger communication between the academy and the public on both sides of the Atlantic. This network will be community-driven, responding flexibly to the needs and desires of its users. What you see here now is simply an early stage along the way toward that network. We encourage our readers and our writers to participate in setting the agenda for developing The Atlantic Community’s full potential.

I see the Atlantic Community not so much as an Invisible College but as part of an Open College. While the voices and content may be as diverse as our field, the main purpose will remain to provide an open space for collaboration and publication which showcases European Americanists. This is what makes the Atlantic Community unique as a niche in the blogosphere. Although a blog post may take many forms, from academic essay, personal diary, open discussion, or “work in progress,” I ultimately hope to see the site strike a balance, both in tone and content, which falls somewhere between academic and journalistic discourses. Trying to define blogging is as futile as trying to define “American Studies.” Yet there is a growing academic blogosphere which represents the broad diversity of “the academy.” Americanists, let alone European Americanists, remain woefully under-represented in this new forum. The Atlantic Community hopes to provide that representation and become an established online voice within the academic blogosphere and across the web.

Visit the Atlantic Community at:

http://atlanticcommunity.blogspot.com/

Stuart Towner Noble is a Graduate Candidate at the Center for American Studies, University of Southern Denmark

Dreaming in Cuban

Dreaming in Cuban: An Historical Perspective
by Dorte Rasmussen

In Christina García’s Dreaming in Cuban from 1992, we learn about and experience the history and culture of Cuba from both inside and outside the Caribbean island. Three generations of women dominate this magically told story of a family divided by the political, social and geographical split, caused by the communist revolution in Cuba. García brilliantly intertwines the factual and historical aspect of Cuba with her own fictional and magical story of the woman, making Cuba an active and important character in the story, by using the history events as time reference to tell the story of the women.

Cuba was from the beginning of colonization commercially and strategically important, due to its central location in the Caribbean, and it immediately became a starting point for Columbus’s expeditions to the rest of Latin America. During the colonial period “the Spaniards wiped out more Indians with smallpox than with muskets” and Cuba was like all the other countries in the region; slave based export-orientated agricultural society. In the book Celia works all day with the sugarcane, Cuba’s main product. It is typically Latin American to have a one product economy, but focusing on a single commodity, made Cuba extremely vulnerable to flux and change in the market. Indeed in the book, Cuba seems to be vulnerable in every aspect, represented by the ever existing threat of the tide and the rain.
But Cuba differed in one aspect; in late 19th century it was still a colony, and it quickly became linked to the US with respect to trade and investment, and a wish to be annexed by the US grew. Independence came in 1898 after the Spanish-American war, where US’s economic interest in Cuba led to the full support in fighting off Spain. Cuba then became under US military occupation, and its status as non-independent became even clearer with the enforcement of the Platt Amendment, which gave the US the power to intervene in domestic Cuban policy. Cuba remained a US protectorate until 1934. In that period the US build infrastructure, schools and so on in order to get Cuba closer to the US’s orbit.

“The waiting began in 1934” when Celia begins her romance with a Spaniard and Cuba enters the Batista era. Batista ruled trough puppet presidents in a period of 25 years. Little changed in this period, which Celia also expresses when se talks about her fear of Cuba being left behind when the rest of the world will physically and ideologically move to the west. Cuba was still not totally independent (dependent on US trade as US purchased 80% of Cuban sugar production). In the 1950s American culture was all over, and tourism along side materialism, flourished. Cuba had become a playground for the American and Cuban elite. Ordinary Cubans was outraged and felt exploited; “Cuba has become the joke of the Caribbean, a place where everything and everyone is for sale”.

García uses Fidel Castro, El Líder, to tell her story the same way se uses Cuba, constantly referring to him to mark the viewpoints and happenings in the women’s lives. Fidel was born in 1927 a son of Spanish immigrant and was from the very beginning a strong nationalist, who wanted to change America.In 1953 he was imprisoned for an attack on the Batista’s army, where afterwards he fled to the Mexican mountains to begin organizing new revolutionary force. Here he hooked up with young Ernesto “Che” Guevara who had a utopian idea of one united Latin American. Among the attacks is the one with the Granma, “the American yacht El Líder took from Mexico to Cuba in 1956”. On New Years Eve 1958/59 Batista resigned as president, having lost all public support. The revolution was a fact, marked by the end of a romance for Celia who writes her last letter to Spanish lover shortly after, and the beginning of a new romance with El Líder. At the same time it marks an end of a romance for Cuba, cutting off US relations, and the birth of Pilar in the aftermath of the revolution represents a new beginning.

Lourdes and Rufino are forced away from their farm, due to the agrarian reform that expropriated land that made their land “property of the revolutionary government”. Castro was extremely anti-American, and quickly nationalized the Cuban economy. At the same time as he began to swing to the Soviet bloc, implementing an authoritarian regime, and egalitarian socioeconomic policy.

Before the revolution Jorge sold electric brooms for an American firm, and he wanted to show his gringo boss that they weren’t different from each other. But, tension between the US and Cuba quickly reached a peak when the US suspended the sugar quotas, and Castro seized the rest of the US’s property making them put a trade embargo on Cuba. The Soviet Union bought Fidel’s support by taking over the US’s sugar quotas wanting him as a communist ally.

Castro was dedicated to fight for the poor, and when Celia thinks of what the revolution has brought she sees that; “No one is starving or denied medical care, no one sleeps on the street”. Castro built one of the world’s best educational system and medical services and illiteracy fell drastically. Life expectancy rose from 63 to 76 in 30 years. In 1975 the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) made the egalitarian family code saying that men should do half the chores at home. In her book, García clearly criticise the patriarchal system of Latin America by focusing on the women, and portraying the male characters as either non-existing or extremely weak.
From her porch Celia would be able to spot another Bay of Pigs invasion; in 1961 the US made a failed invasion, due to fear of loosing all of Latin America to communism. Shortly after, in 1963 US-Cuban relations deteriorated with the Cuban missile crisis.

In 1979 the Cuban population realized that they had no consumer goods, after 100.000 relatives were allowed into Cuba; “I feel like we’re back in time, in a kind of Cuban version of an earlier America”. This caused a huge exodus from Cuba in 1980 when 125.000 fled through the Peruvian embassy (among these, Lourdes and Ivanito).In 1992, the same year as the book was written, and shortly after the Soviet Union collapse, Cuba experienced an enormous economic blow, worse than Great Depression which left even worse conditions for the Cubans. There were fewer food rations, less electricity and no busses due to an oil shortage. In the late 1990s, tourism and money from relatives abroad, kept Cuba afloat.

Identity is another major issue in Latin America, and Cuba is no exception. There exists a notion of blacks and Indians being inferior, animal and childlike, and stupid and an everlasting fear of blackness; like when the sister uses “whitening cream to remove any evidence of her mulatto blood”. In Cuba blackness is mostly defined by the curliness of ones hair. The curlier the more black. The book also addresses the problem of belonging and the trouble an exile Cuban might have in finding an identity for him/herself feeling torn between two nations, and lacking a sense of feeling at home in both countries.

In Miami, where all the boats with fleeing Cubans wanting to pursue the American Dream reach, there exist some profound stereotypes and unhappy destinies; Lourdes talks about leaving Miami unable to bear “the endless brooding over their wealth, the competition for dishwasher jobs”. Though the main part of Latin America is catholic, there still exist some old sects with roots in Africa, Asia and the Latin American culture pre-colonization. An example is the Santería movements, which Felicia is devoted to. This is a set of religious practices brought to Cuba by the African slaves up until abolition in 1886.

Cuba is still under Castro-rule, and it could seem that Celia is right in fearing that Cuba will be left behind or maybe, even disappear into the rain and the tide, just as Celia does in the end. “Cuba is a peculiar exile, I think, an island-colony. We can reach it by a thirty-minute charter flight from Miami, yet never reach it at all”.