Just back from the Southern Historical Association annual meeting in Baltimore. Good times, good times…
May I make a suggestion or two? The SHA needs to do better to facilitate digital participation in the conference. Granted, I have no experience at all in conference logistics, so I don’t know how these things happen, but here are a few items I’d like to see as a user. Participants and audience members, on a voluntary basis, should write up brief reviews right after their panels. Like what Mark Cheathem did here. If I had that level of detail on all the panels, I’d feel much more engaged with the whole conference, and less regretful for missing some fine sessions. To make this happen, secure free Internet. Yeah, I know…I’m naive about this, but Internet in the conference rooms, and free access in hotel rooms would allow more people to be online and write up immediate reviews, read them, and respond to them. I would. I can’t afford to pay the hotel rates for Internet at these fancy joints (perhaps I could if parking and restaurant prices weren’t so high... I’d rather have access to the Internet than access to $9 drinks. I’m getting off track.) Then, get some tables in the rooms for laptop users. Without Internet and without tables, I can only sit in the back row and tweet on my iPhone, which appears to be exceedingly delinquent, discourteous, and all kinds of unprofessional. It’s not. I’m trying to add to the conversation inside and outside the room. These are fairly pedestrian ideas and solutions. Perhaps someone better positioned can make a more high-toned argument about why digital access and participation is a critical thing going forward.
(A realtime digital channel might have alleviated, if not solved, the room fiasco the hotel gave us.)
So, some good papers, some dull ones, and I learned a lot either way. My favorite was Michael E. Woods’ (Univ. of South Carolina) “That Masterful Feeling: Emotion and Slaveholding in the Old South.” Emotions history is a hot thing right now, along with masculinity/manhood studies (often very intertwined.) Michael is pushing the cross-disciplinary stuff to suggest that emotions spring not from ideas, but from psychological and corporeal reactions to reality, leading him to conclude that people channel and utilize emotions into very sincere motivations for behavior. This is a departure from the current analysis that interprets behavior as performance of ideology. Woods is therefore reinterpreting slaveholding behavior in the South Carolina lowcountry in light of contemporary assertions of love, affection, and physical pain. (I don’t think I’m getting this just right, but he’s got an article in a forthcoming Journal of American History, that’s how good his stuff is.) Amazing how different mastery looks when you see it through lenses other than power and violence.
I pause to excerpt an observation about another conference, from the Religion in American History blog. Kelly Baker writes of the American Studies Association conference:
"…sometimes I feel like I have to cajole folks into paying attention to religion as a major component of American life. This seems like a silly thing to say, but religion often only pops up at predictable moments in ASA panels on topics like Civil Rights and suspiciously absent at other times."
No shit, really? (Sorry.) SHA did have religion panels, and I attended one on religion in the “long Civil Rights movement” to expand my horizons (duly expanded). I attended two sessions on how antebellum southerners conceived worldviews, conceptualized behavior toward one another, and ordered their public and private lives, and no mention of religion at all. At each session, an audience member asked the “what about religion?” question. At one session, a panelist made a good effort to address it, but confessed he needed to do better. At the other session, one panelist gave a good answer, but I think it was a poor interpretation of the sources, and another panelist gave…a blank stare for an answer. Really. I say this knowing religion doesn’t have to be an analytical point in all cases, and that it is not appropriate for many. But this topic has a venerable history within the confines of the SHA where twentieth century religion is currently on fire, and it is kicking ass in the larger historical world. But in my space—while religious studies have been real good—it is what the old preachers would call lethargic.
(I say all this knowing that when I publish something, the "what about X?" questions are going to take up the entire reviews.)
p.s. At some point I'm going to need to explain what I mean by "Elite Planter Bingo" in a way that is professional and constructive.
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