The End of the Emergency and the Role of the Humanities
Questions and details from a visit to New Bedford.
“I’m fundamentally a hopeful person, because I know that decisions made the world as it is and that better decisions can change it. Nothing about our situation is inevitable or immutable, but you can’t solve a problem with the consciousness that created it.”
-Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together
Last week, the emergency ended. More specifically, the federal government and the state of Massachusetts officially lifted the restrictions and mandates that reshaped public life. We are not done with COVID, but the rules have changed.
For me, the last few months were…different. I took my wife on a date in a crowded bar, enjoyed a concert in an arena, and visited my kids’ classrooms. I met in person with people who I’d previously only known on Zoom.
This all felt beautiful and dangerous. None of it felt normal. Nor should it.
The world endured a devastating three years, with the devastation falling disproportionately on the most vulnerable. The pandemic period included startling points of clarification. Some people awakened to the facts of racial injustice with the murder of George Floyd. The January 6 attack brought home the specter of political violence. Millions of us lost loved ones to the virus. Gun violence in America and climate change disasters here and abroad stole more lives.
It’s difficult to enumerate the aspects of pre-pandemic public life that crumbled, exploded or faded into the background. We grew accustomed to perpetual uncertainty and relentless tragedy.
Now the emergency is over. What changed? What can we plug back in? What should we cast off?
These are questions for the humanities. In this return to public life, we will need to reexamine the promises we made during lockdown about how the future would be different. We learned many things on the fly. What improvised means of communication are worth keeping, and with whom? We can write down our memories and we can reflect on what no longer seems important. With all that we battled during the heights of COVID, what seems worth fighting for now?
These are also questions for the public humanities as a field. The last three years brought reckonings with the nation’s past, and urgent calls for cultural institutions to address representation and justice.
Protests about police violence and climate change arrived inside major museums, carrying with them long-simmering demands for representation and repatriation. A public that was largely limited to digital discourse now returns to our museums and monuments with new questions about collections, curators and donor lists. Rebranding will meet community, and new conversations will arise.
Humanities professionals and institutions stand at a critically important moment. We must guard against retrenchment and make good on our promises. The coming months are a time to show that humanities organizations are not just open for business—we must actively respond to the changes brought on by the pandemic and its accompanying epiphanies.
Our value, it seems to me, comes when we serve as connectors and common ground. The humanities are the ways we understand one another and ourselves. That search for understanding feels radical in post-pandemic America. How will our museums and cultural spaces welcome back people transformed by the experiences of the last three years?
It may show up in the details. As I return to humanities spaces and experiences I knew pre-pandemic, I find myself alive to small things that are different. Not so much grand statements, but the changes in fulfilling the mission.
Which brings me to New Bedford.
Geography and Memory
In the afternoon of the day when I reached New Bedford, I visited the wharves, to take a view of the shipping.
-Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
On a recent May morning, the air was cold and humid in New Bedford. Whenever I visit the historic port city on the southeast coast of Massachusetts, I take a walk. It is roughly the same walk every time. I start at the Nathan and Polly Johnson House, headquarters of the New Bedford Historical Society and once the home of an African American family with a pivotal role in the abolition movement. It was here in 1838 that Frederick Douglass and his wife reached freedom and took a new name.
This spring, a new Abolition Row Park will open across the street, featuring a statue of a twenty-year old Douglass as he appeared upon his arrival in the city. The project is led by Lee Blake, historian, educator and director of the historical society, and the support of the city and state. Blake and her community deserve credit for the ongoing work to uplift one of the most significant locations in American history.
Walking down Union Street towards the harbor, I tried to imagine Douglass and the city he observed in the final pages of his narrative.
From the wharves I strolled around and over the town, gazing with wonder and admiration at the splendid churches, beautiful dwellings and finely cultivated gardens; evincing an amount of wealth, comfort, taste, and refinement, such as I had never seen in any part of slaveholding Maryland. Every thing looked clean, new, and beautiful.
I reached the midpoint of the Fairhaven Bridge, where traffic bunched up as the bridge lifted to allow a boat to pass. Men in hardhats worked quietly at the base of a crane. A thin fog blanketed the harbor.
Waves of immigrants, drawn by the fishing industry, have defined the city. My previous visits to New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center shaped my understanding this place. Led by the great oral historian Laura Orleans, the center collects the stories of the people whose labor and skills make New Bedford the country’s highest-grossing commercial fishing port. Here is a humanities organization dedicated to uplifting the stories of families from Portugal, Vietnam, Norway, Guatemala, and Cape Verde, of people who still see Massachusetts as a place to forge the American Dream. The Center has received major support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Mass Humanities.
“Knut Arnsheim said he don’t care how’s my English, he cares about [whether] I know how to cut the fish and do the job on the boat. That’s what he needs. That’s why I get a job.”
-Lo Van Nguyen, from New Bedford Heritage Center’s “Stories of Immigration”
In 1841, Herman Melville covered that same waterfront. I visited the city for the first time in January 2019, not long after I moved to Massachusetts, to participate in the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s annual Moby Dick marathon. I headed back to the Whaling Museum on my most recent trip to see what had changed.
Common Ground: Community Stories
The voices of community members descend from above display cases and transcriptions that line the walls, so that you can tune into recordings that correspond to the collection of artifacts and text. There are interactive screens, family heirlooms and children’s toys. The gallery ripples with memory.
With support from Mass Humanities, the museum has collected hundreds of stories from local residents for Common Ground: Community Stories. The archive comes alive in the new exhibition’s elegant means of delivery, both at the museum and online (see more here). You learn the stories of people like Candida Rose Baptista, a local singer, songwriter, and educator, through transcription, video, a few of her favorite records, and the sound of her voice.
There was a woman named Sebastiana who lived in Bay Village, who took care of me for a good two to three years while my father was trying to figure out how to find ways to raise his children. I was with her, with Sebastiana, from the ages of, say, six to eight, I would say. Six to eight, six to nine. I learned a lot of Cape Verdean songs. I tell the story of being a six-year-old and remembering the song called Chapéu de Palha. I think, matter of fact, right in this room where we're at right now, I did a presentation a couple years ago and talked about Chapéu de Palha, which means straw hat. So I remember learning that, as it was sort of a first song, and learning Cape Verdean poems. This place is sort of magical for me, New Bedford, just in general. This stretch of land is just very magical for me.
-Candida Rose Baptista, Common Ground interview (listen)
There are stories of Wampanoag residents alongside those of Italian and African-American descent, stories of factories and neighborhoods. A resident who wished to remain anonymous speaks of anti-Semitism in the city. The impacts of global trends are here, but also tales of growing up. “I wanted to be my father’s son,” says Gil Perry, “and there was a reason. My father had a falling out with his father when I was an infant. So I never met him.”
This the humanities at human scale, oral history as a channel for joy and old wounds. A museum, it’s been said, should complicate things. In Common Ground, you get New Bedford at its complicated best. You walk through a gallery but feel as if you are crossing from living room to porch to street corner.
In this post-emergency moment, it is all the more important for institutions, like people, to keep listening. Just as we did in that first spring of the pandemic, when the songs of birds seemed more alive than ever, we need to stay tuned in to our neighbors. The humanities refresh our ears.
Re/Framing the View: Nineteenth Century American Landscapes.
The Whaling Museum offered several important exhibitions of paintings during the pandemic, most recently Re/Framing the View: Nineteenth Century American Landscapes. An exquisite collection of landscapes, almost all of them by white men, reflect the era’s fascination with the nation’s natural beauty. At first glance, the collection looks not so different from those you find in a great regional museums. You’re either interested in that era, or you pass by to more provocative work.
What was different this time—and what makes the Whaling Museum very much a nationally significant museum—comes in the contextualization provided by the accompanying text and the juxtaposition of artworks that call the landscapes into question. Analysis, art history and curation are humanities practices. And in the small print and smart curation of this exhibition, we see the power of the humanities in the present moment.
Each panel brings a new perspective on paintings one might glide past. If we stick to the titles, dates and artists for each landscape, we repeat the exclusions of the past. These are masculine visions from the era of Manifest Destiny. The text and juxtapositions bring out all the violence of those visions. Pointing to the places where 19th century men make Indigenous people into ornaments, the curators counterpunch with brilliant contemporary work from Elizabeth James Perry (Aquinnah Wampanoag), who uses traditional ecological knowledge to make her own statement on the landscape.
Common Ground and Re/Framing the View feel related to me. In the former, there is the potential for any museum that actively welcomes the community by foregrounding their voices as significant and powerful. In the latter, we see the power of curators to to turn older work toward new relevance by upending the assumptions that make white domination the lingua franca of so many institutions.
I asked Amanda McMullen, director of the Whaling Museum, to speak to the connections she sees in this exhibitions. Here’s what she had to say:
Museums should always be evolving and stretching. What’s key, though, is to know who you are so you don’t drift. Our 2020 strategic plan defined our mission to ignite learning through art, history, science and culture. Like many historical societies formed at the turn of the century, we began as a legacy institution. Today, I am focused on reshaping what legacy means and ensuring that we are telling a comprehensive and inclusive community story and examining our histories from all angles in pursuit of a broader legacy narrative. Through Re/framing the View and Common Ground, it was our hope and intention that wider cultural story-telling emerges.
Given the multi-year oral history outreach and engagement, Common Ground: Community Stories, enabled the Whaling Museum to play the role of convener. I am perhaps most proud that the this exhibition was co-curated with the community. It is not a museum and all its scholarly heft telling our neighbors who they are; rather the richness and authenticity of this exhibition comes from our neighbors sharing themselves, their stories, their personal artifacts, their voices. In Re/Framing the View: Nineteenth century American Landscapes, a visitor could simply enjoy a gorgeous collection of works. For those inclined to dive deeper, I am proud that we offered perspective on the presence and absence of Women artists, Artists of Color and Native artists, as well as depictions of Native of people. With many of these works illustrating landscapes now lost, this show also gave deep consideration to environmental impact of the last one hundred years. In both exhibitions and through the Re/framing catalog and permanent Common Ground oral history archive, it is my hope that a new museum model is on evident. One that reflects the rich community of New Bedford, and offers a number of points of entry to learning. In achieving this, we truly ignite learning.
To be continued
My work takes me to cities and towns across Massachusetts, where I have the privilege of meeting people engaged in reimagining the humanities. I want to keep my eyes open in the next few months to the changes underway in institutions across the Commonwealth. Due to the range of institutions, resources and cultures we have, what happens in the humanities here matters beyond our borders. What takes place over the rest of 2023 will tell us a lot about the direction of the field and, I’d argue, the nation.