In the current interest in American pragmatism, the role of African American intellectuals within that tradition, together with questions of race and ethnic identity, has increasingly been given serious attention. Cornel West, for example, argued in The American Evasion of Philosophy (1989) that pragmatism represented our most important intellectual tradition for confronting the inequalities that existed due to “hierarchies based on class, race, gender and sexual orientation.” Nevertheless, West claimed, it was a flawed tradition still limited in its intellectual and social reach because “the complex formulations and arguments of American pragmatists shape and are shaped by the social structures that exploit and oppress.” Given this claim, West challenged his readers to expand “the pragmatist canon to encompass a major body of critical reflection on ‘race’ and racism in the United States.”

Of those who have responded to West's challenge, Nancy Fraser was one of the first to link her critical project directly with that of his. In “Another Pragmatism: Alain Locke, Critical ‘Race’ Theory, and the Politics of Culture” (1995), Fraser writes, “I intend to take up Cornel West's challenge. I am going to discuss a recently rediscovered work by another African-American theorist of ‘race’ and racism who was trained in philosophy at Harvard under Josiah Royce and William James early in this century and who also deserves a place in the “pragmatist pantheon.” Thus, whereas W E. B. Du Bois was the only African American to appear in West's “pragmatist pantheon,” Fraser gave a careful reading of five lectures that Locke gave at Howard University in the spring of 1916 — “Race Contacts and Interracial Relations: A Study of the Theory and Practice of Race” — to establish his pragmatic credentials. These credentials, however, included his specific use of race as a form of social solidarity; that is, as an expression of group solidarity, race served to articulate as well as shape the cultural and political needs of African Americans. For this reason, Fraser argued that although “pragmatism undoubtedly lay at the core of Locke's 1916 vision,” his “lectures present a strand of pragmatist thought that differs importantly from the mainstream of the movement.”

With the persistence of repetition compulsion, Modernists define their movement vis-à-vis the classic Freudian assumption that sexuality is the mainspring of virtually everything, including literary merit. The most libidinous of their aesthetic manifestos is Ezra Pound's characterization of creativity as a “phallus or spermatozoid charging, head-on, the female chaos … driving a new idea into the great passive vulva of London.” Though C. G. Jung is far less enamored of the phallus, he endows masculinity with the “creative and procreative” power of Logos, which, echoing Pound, he calls the “spermatic word.” As if to fend off “scribbling women,” Jung warns that “mental masculinization of the woman has unwelcome results,” most notably frigidity, homosexuality, and “a deadly boring kind of sophistry.” Gertrude Stein's iconoclasm notwithstanding, her paradoxical assertion that her genius is masculine simultaneously reifies and defies this theory that biology determines literary destiny. In the Modernist canon, the pen is a penis, even when a cigar is just a cigar. The most influential of the movement's manifestos, T. S. Eliot's “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” codifies aesthetic essentialism, positing an Oedipal model of canonicity contingent on the authority of literary fathers. Even Virginia Woolf's rejection of gendered canonicity in A Room of One's Own assumes its tenacity, as if she were protesting too much against the inevitable.

Woolf is not alone in protesting too much. Modernism's swaggering canonicity masks a castration anxiety that debilitated F. Scott Fitzgerald and even bedeviled Papa Hemingway in The Garden of Eden. One of Hemingway's most famous letters to Fitzgerald, written during the tortured composition of Tender Is the Night, provides a paradigmatic example of the Modernist crisis of masculinity:

We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it – don't cheat with it…. You see, Bo, you're not a tragic character.

Ring Lardner's position in American literature suffers more from the praise he gains than the criticism he receives. His reputation as an acerbic journalist, mordant satirist, master dialectician, and popular sportswriter still draws clouds of suspicion across the minds of highbrow critics weighing his stature as a serious writer.

Lardner himself did nothing to debunk the notion that he was at heart a pulp author, never tearing away from his journalistic roots as did other authors who started their careers in the newspaper business. It may have been comfort with his preferred environment, or a reverse snobbery, but Lardner always disdained self-conscious artfulness, instead preening his image as a wordsmith and copy-slave. Max Perkins, his Scribner's editor, noted this self-defined lowbrow posture: “He always thought of himself as a newspaperman, anyhow. He had a sort of provincial scorn for literary people.”

Provincial scorn notwithstanding, Lardner was a prominent member of Perkins's stable. Contemporaries at Scribner's included Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Perkins, a literary talent scout with a knack for coaxing maximum output from mercurial writers, devoted ample time and attention to cultivating Lardner's work. Few writers of any stripe could boast more lustrous friends and colleagues, and, in his lifetime, Lardner's proper place in the American literary pantheon was accorded with scant complaint. It was only after his death in 1933 that the diminishing process began.

In Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain, eminent southernist Y(stet)Fred Hobson argues that since the early 19th century, southern discourse has been dominated by a desire to explain the South to a nation critical of its practices. This “rage to explain” was particularly apparent in the era known as the Southern Renaissance — the period roughly between World War I and World War II that saw a flowering of southern letters and intellectual life. During this period, southern poets, novelists, essayists, historians, and sociologists participated in a comprehensive enactment of the southern “rage to explain” the South, both to itself and to the rest of the world. Within this outbreak of explanation, a significant pattern emerges: a pattern of resistance to what I shall call the myth of a two-class white South.

Throughout American history, northerners and southerners alike have colluded to create the impression that the antebellum white South consisted of only two classes: aristocratic planters on one extreme and debased poor whites on the other. This impression was initiated in the 18th century, when William Byrd's histories of the dividing line introduced the image of the poor white in the form of the laughable “Lubberlander.” The stereotype of the comic and/or degraded poor white can be traced from Byrd through George Washington Harris's tales of Sut Lovingood (1867) to William Alexander Percy's diatribes against poor whites in Lantern on the Levee (1941) and William Faulkner's unflattering portrayal of the Snopeses (1940–59). Meanwhile, the images of the courteous, kindly planter and of the plantation as pastoral idyll can be traced from John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn (1832) through the postbellum plantation fiction of Thomas Nelson Page to Stark Young's Civil War romance, So Red the Rose (1934).

Historical texts, oral testimony, and scholarship document vividly the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II — the loss of private property and personal belongings, and the emotional and psychological suffering, that the imprisonment caused. Yet there is very little visual evidence in the photographic record of incarceration that would attest overtly to these injustices. A photograph on April 1, 1942, by Clem Albers, a photographer for the War Relocation Authority (WRA), depicts three well-dressed young women who have just boarded a train in Los Angeles, which will take them to a so-called assembly center (Figure l). The photograph would appear at first glance to tell a very different story. The women smile and extend their arms out of a raised train window to wave goodbye, as if they are embarking on a vacation or some other pleasant excursion. The Albers photograph is not an exception to the photographic record of incarceration. In the thousands of photographs made of the incarceration process by government photographers, independent documentarians, and “internees,” it is much more difficult to find photographs that portray suffering than it is to find images of smiling prisoners.

Not surprisingly, these photographs of smiling Japanese Americans are unsettling for those scholars, curators, and activists who have worked to expose the injustices of the wartime imprisonment. The smiles are charged for several reasons: They appear to belie the injustice of incarceration and the suffering it caused, they are reminiscent of the ugly stereotype of the grinning Oriental, and they suggest that those portrayed were entirely compliant with the government's racist agenda.

The story of the Issei — the 100,000 Japanese immigrants who traveled to Hawaii and the United States during the turn of the 20th century — is an epic of survival amid hardship. Through the efforts of labor contractors backed by the Japanese consulate, the majority of the newcomers were recruited to undertake heavy labor on Hawaiian plantations. Others settled on the mainland, predominantly on the nation's Pacific Coast, where they worked as farmers, fishermen, railroad workers, and agricultural laborers. Smaller contingents of students, artists, and professionals also crossed the ocean and scattered through the United States. As the immigrants became established, many brought over “picture bride” wives and started families. Through careful saving of wages and communal self-help, numerous immigrant laborers bought farms and established small businesses, churches, and community institutions. At the same time, they were victimized by widespread racial prejudice and discriminatory legislation. Like other Asian immigrants, they were barred from naturalization by federal law, and therefore from voting, and in many states the Issei were forbidden to marry whites or to practice certain professions. In Hawaii, the white planter class limited educational opportunity and kept Issei in menial labor positions. On the West Coast, white laborers and political leaders, who rigidly excluded Asian workers from unions, organized movements to exclude the Issei from residence on the grounds that they depressed wage scales through their willingness to work for lower pay. Following the “Gentlemen's Agreement” of 1907–8, the entry of Japanese laborers into the country was largely restricted. Shortly thereafter, in response to demands by white farmers enraged by competition from their Issei counterparts, California and neighboring states enacted alien land acts, which forbade all Japanese and other “immigrants ineligible to citizenship” from owning agricultural land. As a result, the Issei were forced to take short-term leases on land or to put their holdings in the names of white colleagues or of their own children, the Nisei (American-born citizens of Japanese ancestry). Exclusionist pressure, founded on nativist opposition to the alleged racial danger posed by the Issei to the American population, flared up again following World War I and climaxed in the Immigration Act of 1924, which outlawed all Japanese immigration to the United States.

The resettlement and activism of Japanese Americans in New York City during the 1940s represents a notable chapter within the large and complex history of the city's Nikkei (ethnic Japanese) community. Throughout the 20th century, the New York community has been distinctive among those in the United States. Like the larger city itself, New York's Nikkei population has been notable for demographic and occupational diversity, extraordinary cosmopolitanism, and political and artistic effervescence. At the same time, in stark contrast to its Pacific Coast counterparts, the New York community has long been marked by a lack of group cohesion, which the scattered residential pattern and transient nature of many of its members did nothing to reduce.

Both these salient community characteristics — political/artistic self-assertion and dispersion — were accentuated with the coming of World War II. The impending conflict between Washington and Tokyo led to the abrupt departure of a large proportion of the city's Nikkei residents back to Japan. However, in the weeks after Pearl Harbor, a new group of anti-Fascist Japanese Americans, largely first generation, assumed community leadership. Their group was subsequently reinforced with the arrival of second-generation intellectuals and artists from the West Coast, who had been incarcerated en masse in camps and elected to resettle in the city afterward. Although the newcomers experienced discrimination and difficulties, they joined with the city's established Japanese population to form a truly cohesive community, with its nucleus the popular activist group Japanese American Committee for Democracy. Yet this group, because of its connections with the Communist Party, demonstrated the limitations as well as the force of Japanese-American political action.

In early 1968, two development sites lay virtually side by side in Lower Downtown Manhattan. West of Broadway, the clearing of thirty blocks spectacularly announced the Port Authority's intention to build a World Trade Center (WTC) complex. Along Broadway itself, a more modest, two-block site awaited the U.S. Steel Building, later renamed 1 Liberty Plaza. The northern half of this site, bounded by Cortland and Liberty Streets, block 62, had most recently been the address of the Singer Tower, an Ernest Flagg-designed building that, in the eighteen months after its completion in 1908, had been the tallest building in the world. In 1967, it once again attained record status, which it, in fact, retains: the tallest building in the world to be intentionally demolished by its owners.

This essay resides in the cultural moment represented by these two sites, these two locations of erasures and reinscription. Instead of looking at what would be built — the intensely analyzed WTC site — let us examine what had been erased next door: a particular aesthetic, an earlier form of corporate capitalism massed in the outline of a grand cityscape. Produced by the burgeoning, international sewing-machine trade in the early 20th century and brought down by the pressures of the international, industrial competition of the 1960s, the life of the Singer Tower takes New York City from the exuberance of the first decade of the century to the decline of city fortunes at the end of American industrial dominance. Its demise is also the result of cultural triage performed by historic preservationists in the years immediately after the passage of New York City's Landmark legislation in 1965.

Scholars have long acknowledged the crucial role biography plays in Marsden Hartley's oeuvre, as many have used his autobiography Somehow a Past and his homosexuality to interpret his recurring motifs. As a recognized writer and painter, he figured prominently in American modernism and was among the first to explore abstraction as his prime expression. Heavily influenced by European models, he forged a mature style drawn from German expressionism and his affinity for the mystic transcendentalism of writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and Walt Whitman. A lifelong transient, he stood apart from those in the Alfred Stieglitz circle (Figure 1), spending more time outside the United States than in, returning at the end of his life to become “the painter of Maine.” General consensus allows that Hartley's early life influenced his images directly; but, more specifically, art historian Bruce Robertson suggests that Hartley turned to self-portraiture in his last years to work through childhood issues of loss and abandonment. Following suit, this essay considers these tender issues further with a reading of four late paintings, of which two are not yet recognized as self-portraits.

The paintings themselves are treated as sites to explore and define the self, in the words of the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, as a “potential space” in which the artist reengages with and attempts to resolve past issues. More specifically, Winnicott describes a psychological transition, a buffer zone between mind and reality, used to cope with maturational issues. In this metaphorical space, one creates symbols and forms object relationships, meaning, a personal language with which to negotiate the real world and one's place in it. All cultural production, Winnicott argues, results from this interim process, which acts as a defensive filter to mitigate harsh truths — in Hartley's case, the loss of both parents and feelings of rejection. From this perspective, I focus narrowly on the symbolic arrangement by which identity issues merge with metaphysics, sex, and death. Although much has been written on these themes, I interpret the paintings' usefulness to Hartley, the ways that they functioned as tools, moving him toward personal integration. In dealing with issues of loss and mourning, I necessarily reflect on dark subject matter; even so, this study is not meant to represent the whole of Hartley's character. A complex person, he was not in a constant state of turmoil and, as Jonathan Weinberg, Donna Cassidy, and many others have demonstrated, Hartley was driven by much more than psychological angst. However, the lens of psychoanalysis (in this case, psychobiography and object relations) provides an additional way to interpret these late images.

Clement Greenberg (1909–94) and Harold Rosenberg (1906–78) were the two art critics most closely associated with abstract expressionism in the 1940s and 1950s. Neither began their careers as art critics, however. By the mid-1980s, Rosenberg had published literary essays and poems in left-wing magazines, and Greenberg's articles and reviews first appeared at the end of that decade. During the 1940s, Greenberg began to write art criticism, and Rosenberg's essays began to appear frequently in the 1950s. By that time, both had become part of the group known informally as the New York Intellectuals, many of whom were Jewish and children of immigrant parents.

Highly verbal, vocal, argumentative, and politically left of center, they often published in magazines such as Partisan Review, Commentary, and Dissent. Although both Greenberg and Rosenberg ultimately rejected the more dogmatic and authoritarian aspects of leftist politics, they nevertheless supported the idea that society must move forward, but not necessarily by political means. Greenberg thought that such momentum could be maintained by the cultural elite, and Rosenberg, influenced by surrealism's concerns for the creative process, believed that individuals who were independent minded and creative could do the same. Both encouraged artists to turn from the social concerns that engaged many during the 1930s to apolitical, self-searching themes that came to characterize the art of the 1940s. In effect, they, especially Rosenberg, lionized the artist as an heroic individual. In the words of one historian, both “worked to find a safe haven for radical progress within the realm of individualistic culture.” And both, among the most perspicacious critics of their time, discovered, encouraged, and/or supported artists who ultimately became major figures, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

The year 1998 marked the centennial of the birth of artist Ben Shahn (1898–1969). Coupled with the approach of the millennium, which many museums celebrated by surveying the cultural production of the 20th century, the centennial offered the perfect opportunity to mount a major exhibition of Shahn's work (the last comprehensive exhibition had taken place at the Jewish Museum in New York City in 1976). The moment was also propitious because a renewed interest in narrative, figurative art, and political art encouraged scholarly and popular appreciation of Ben Shahn, whose reputation within the history of American art had been eclipsed for many decades by the attention given to the abstract expressionists. The Jewish Museum responded in 1998 with Common Man, Mythic Vision: The Paintings of Ben Shahn, organized by the Museum's curator Susan Chevlowe, with abstract expressionism scholar Stephen Polcari (Figure 1). The exhibition traveled to the Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania and closed at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1999.

Smaller Shahn exhibitions then in the planning stages (although not scheduled to open during the centennial year) were to focus on selected aspects of Shahn's oeuvre: the Fogg Museum was to present his little-known New York City photographs of the 1930s in relationship to his paintings, and the Jersey City Museum intended to exhibit his career-launching series, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1931–32). Knowing this, Chevlowe smartly chose to focus on the later years of Shahn's career and on his lesser-known easel paintings of the post-World War II era. In so doing, Chevlowe challenged viewers to expand their understanding both of the artist and his place in 20th-century American art.

This essay addresses some of the ambiguities of the western portrait project conducted by Richard Avedon (1923–2004) between 1978 and 1984, a project that resulted in both a major exhibition, initially mounted at the Anion Carter Museum of Western Art in Fort Worth, Texas, and the portfolio-sized book In the American West (1985). The book version, insofar as such a thing is possible, echoed between covers, in sequencing and scale, the design experience of the exhibition, with its large prints of the images, even though, according the person who supervised the photographic printing, Avedon's regular studio manager Rue-di Hofman, the reproductions in the book did not achieve quite the same “intensifying, clarifying” quality (his words) as the exhibition prints, which — at life size or slightly larger — were huge. All of the images were taken in the same way, with the subjects standing in front of a large sheet of white paper fixed to a wall, in natural light, and in the shade. The white-background technique is a precondition for several of the project's ambiguities. It means that the subjects of the resulting portraits are, in the perceptive words of one critic, “literally nowhere.”

Certainly, if they are from — or even of — the American West, they are not visually in the American West. Indeed, a question mark is raised over the project's referentiality in general. I stress “ambiguities” because the project really does touch upon problematic issues in a number of areas that seem, still, at the suspension of my labors, to elude firm resolution. These areas include both the obvious, such as photographic portraiture and the representation of the American West, and the less evident, such as public taste, corporate patronage, and, at the project's philosophical edge, ontology. I will seek to illuminate In the American West by situating it in several contexts — biographical, historical, geographic, aesthetic and, tentatively, philosophical — each of which should serve to bring out differing, and sometimes conflicting, aspects of the project.

The story of public art in the United States is also the story of American democratic institutions. Our public schools in particular, malleable and shifting under changing societal expectations, provide clues about the nature of our educational enterprise in their very design and the commissioned art that enhances them. In New York City, home to the nation's largest public school system and one of the first, art in schools is a barometer of aesthetic preferences and a measure of larger social issues. The constellation of events that led to the decentralization of New York City's schools in 1970 also led to the creation of an outstanding collection of work by African-American artists at Brooklyn's Boys' and Girls' High School.

Better known for its athletics and as the school that hosted Nelson Mandela than for its public art, Boys' and Girls' High School first opened its doors as the Central School, with a Girls' department on Nostrand Avenue and a Boys' department on Court Street. In 1886, the Girls' department moved into a new building on Nostrand Avenue and in September 1890 school officials changed the official organization of the school to two schools, with Girls' High School on Nostrand Avenue (with added wings under construction) and Boys'High School (under construction) on Marcy Avenue. By 1960, efforts were under way to build a replacement school. The planning of the new Boys' and Girls' High School coincided with the fight by New York City minority groups for local school control, and the commissioning of art for the new building was paradigmatic of this struggle.

“Hue is the most beautiful city in the world,” a Vietnamese woman tells Marine Lieutenant Kramer, a central character in Robert Roth's Vietnam War novel, Sand in the Wind. Published in 1973, five years after the sweeping Tet Offensive had reduced Hue to rubble, Sand in the Wind set the city within a complex meditation upon beauty and its relation to human desire, history, the vagaries of chance, ephemerality of happiness, and ineluctability of loss. Though ambitious in intent, Sand in the Wind has not been widely acclaimed. Except for John Hellmann's close reading, it has usually been referred to passingly or overlooked. Thomas Myers dismissed it as a “sterile mural,” a static work fixed upon a wall. I prefer to think of it as “walking point” — an action Myers ascribed to Vietnam War fiction he endorsed for “cutting trails” (227). Like the pointman of a patrol who clears a path for others to follow, the Vietnam War novel, Myers argued, opened a way into tangled historic territory — the territory of war now inhabited by literature. I propose to enter this forbidding area through Sand in the Wind, for I believe that like the novels Myers lauded it too secures a way, a unique way, of engaging safely with the Vietnam War and the losses it entailed.

The lives of an estimated 5,713 soldiers, American and Vietnamese, were lost in the battle at Hue, as were almost 3,000 civilian lives. That the “longest and bloodiest” battle of the Offensive took place in Hue during the festive days of Tet was particularly shocking, for Hue was commonly considered an open city, and Tet, the lunar New Year, a time of peace and renewal. Traditionally, Tet Nguyen Dan ushered in the new year with three days of festivity, days of respite during which communal bonds were strengthened. Family members and their relatives renewed the bond of blood by gathering together for an exchange of gifts and good wishes; ancestral bonds were renewed by visits to family graves. Rice farmers plowing their paddies renewed the bond between man and nature.