Hope and Memory in Milan

Robert A. Gross

College of William and Mary

Presentation to Seventh Biennial Symposium

The Milan Group in Early United States History

June 20-23, 2000

A century or so ago, Frederick Jackson Turner went to the Word's Fair in Chicago and declared the frontier era of American history at an end. But thanks to his influence, "the frontier" gained a new lease on life in the realm of thought. In the writings of historians, as well as in fiction and film, the West – the ever-shifting location of the frontier – offered the clue to American distinctiveness: the mainspring of equality, individualism, and democracy, to admirers of the nation; the source of crudity, aggression, and violence, in the eyes of critics. Even as the United States became in the twentieth century an urban-industrial society with a polyglot population, the "frontier thesis" hung on in historiography, an inescapable presence in textbooks and graduate examinations. Only with the political and intellectual rebellions of the 1960s was the frontier rejected as the crucible of American character. Simultaneously, the Western lost its popularity in the larger culture. Spurning old myths, a new generation set out to recover the rich diversity of American life, in all its varieties of race, ethnicity, and class, gender and sexual preference, region and religion, to document the injustices and inequalities of the national past, and to trace the continuing contests for democracy from colonial times to the present. At the height of Sixties radicalism, the true frontier lay on the barricades in the freedom struggles of the day.

Now, "frontiers" are back, with positive resonances emanating not from the hunters, scouts, and farmers of Turner's vision, but from the pioneers of the global revolution in communications and trade remaking every aspect of our lives. Ours is a world where goods, people, and ideas flow incessantly across borders of all sorts, confounding systems of control, unsettling cultural forms, generating rich opportunities for social invention. In this expansive spirit, our conference organizer summons us to revalue frontiers. On that uncharted terrain, "physical and conceptual," Loretta Mannucci suggested back in December 1998, "the known, the defined, the 'That's us!' and the "that's how it's done' meet the new experience, the new place, the new idea, the new territory." Our conference program, it appears, has answered her call. To judge from the paper titles, frontiers offer "liminal" spaces for "making and unmaking" society. They are treacherous "marchlands" on which structures of patriarchy and deference are "imperiled." They invite us to cross boundaries, to embrace fluidity, to re-imagine politics, society, and culture. Frederick Jackson Turner would have appreciated this agenda. Though we may wish to "bury" Turner with "the frontier," his spirit lives on.

That is especially the case in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies, whose practitioners have always prided themselves on crossing intellectual borders. Experimentalism used to mean openness to new sources, methods, and theories. Today, it touches the very definition of the subject. Once "America" was conceived as a unified entity, delimited by a changing geography and driven by the internal life within its borders. No more. In a global age, the nation-state is losing the aura of inevitability. Even the last superpower must succumb. Fractured by pluralism within, the United States is also subject to powerful forces without. It can no more stem the tide of illegal drugs than stop the influx of illegal immigrants. The economy is vulnerable to bank failures in Thailand, the environment to global warming. Popular culture borrows heavily from abroad. The current television hits – the game show "Do You Want to Be a Millionaire," the "real life" adventure series "Survivor" – are adaptations of European originals. Despite Republican fantasies of a fortress America, the defining ethos is "transnational." Like the so-called "American" automobile, our culture boasts a national character, though it copies foreign models and is constituted from foreign-made parts.

American Studies is rapidly adjusting to the times. Discarding the national outlook as obsolete, leading figures now embrace "transnationalism." That term designates the latest intellectual frontier in a field that has been radically remade under the multicultural challenge. Indeed, it carries the multicultural impulse to the international plane. If diversity at home is a good thing, how much better the wider world, in all its heterogeneity! That is the nursery of a new cosmopolitanism and an emerging international citizenship. "Transnationalism" also sustains a critique of the new world order. Who actually benefits from globalization? Is the World Trade Organization merely a new instrument of an old imperialism, profiting a cosmopolitan elite, centered in America and Europe, at the expense of working people in the West and whole nations in the Third World? In the wake of the Seattle protests, those questions cannot be avoided. Nor are they in American Studies. The field retains its oppositional spirit, even as it changes intellectual direction and assumes new organizational forms. In this critical mood, a European Journal of American Studies was inaugurated in 1999, with the aim of fostering debates "at various boundaries where traditional allegiances of national identity are encountering the turbulence of the transnational" (Giles, 16). And this very month, not far from us in Bellagio, a new International Association of American Studies came into being. Its first major conference will take place next year in New Zealand.

On my first journey to a Milan Group meeting back in 1986, I devoted my hours in the air to devouring David Lodge's satirical novel Small World, which tracks the peregrinations of a little band of high-flying literary intellectuals from one academic conference to another. Caught up in rivalries and affairs, they hardly notice their isolation in self-regarding rhetoric and their deracination from the folks back home. Is that the fate of pioneers on the transnational frontier? What sort of intellectual community is required to comprehend the refiguring of citizenship and culture in a global age?

The Milan Group, I suggest, offers one model. Well before anybody in American Studies was talking about transnationalism, it was bringing together Europeans, Britons, Americans, and others every two years to explore the history of the United States in the then-neglected period from the Revolution to the Civil War. Over the years, under Loretta Mannucci's aegis, it has become increasingly interdisciplinary and comparative. At a time when visiting American speakers, funded by the USIA, dominated conferences on American Studies in Europe, the Milan Group set its own intellectual agenda. It has always been a collaborative enterprise, in which U.S.-based scholars constitute a minority of participants. Typically, one third of the presenters and chairs have been Italian, a quarter French, a tenth British; Americans normally constitute one-third. This meeting, with Americans the single largest cohort (35%), is an exception to the rule. At twenty years old, with a successful record of conferences and publications, it can claim to be the forerunner of transnational American Studies, the advance scout on the intellectual frontiers.

If we consider our enterprise as a case study in the formation of intellectual community, as I propose to do, we can illuminate some challenges and dangers of transnationalism. Why, we might ask, has the work of the Milan Group been overlooked by enthusiasts of the new approach? Perhaps because national horizons have framed our perspective. In the pages of the Quaderni, most essays dealing with U.S. history draw on American sources and scholarship. Texts in languages other than English are absent from the notes. Hardly any of the big name Continental theorists of recent decades – Derrida, Foucault, Bourdieu, Habermas -- makes an appearance; when they do, it is usually in Loretta Mannucci's work. Then again, the essays on French history display the same inward-looking bent. To be sure, Milan Group symposia have fostered discussions across national borders. But these conversations have been reflected in only a few comparative essays, such as Lynn Hunt on the French and American Revolutions and Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh on the transatlantic working class. "No single voice, no general purpose" runs through these volumes, advises our general editor, Loretta Mannucci. But such variety is in service to a common task: reconstructing a national past.

These are observations, not criticisms. Nor do they distinguish the Milan Group's publications from recent essays in American Quarterly. The rhetoric of transnationalism far outstrips its achievements. Most practitioners of American Studies concentrate on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet, it is in studies of the early modern era, most notably, of slavery in the Atlantic world, that transnational scholarship has flourished. As specialists on "early United States history," members of the Milan Group are attentive to such work.

But the intellectual vitality of our enterprise lies elsewhere. It resides not in any specific subject but in the exchange of approaches to the past. For two decades, the Milan Group has pursued themes at the cutting edge of historical scholarship. The Quaderni are monuments to the new cultural history. Language, narrative, and representation: the various devices for encoding and elaborating ideology command sustained attention. Such concerns are applied to moments of historical rupture – protests, rebellions, and revolutions – and to projects for utopian futures. "When the shooting is over," the ideological work is continued in the creation of "cultural memory." On these frontiers of scholarship, new sources are constantly being discovered: songs, visual images, feasts and celebrations, collective rituals, the display of the body. From the beginning, these new sources and methods have been marshaled with an eye to "the forming of a national self-image – or images." In advance of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, the Milan Group announced at its start that national identity is a cultural construction. That formative insight is a central premise of the new transnationalism.

I want to make a still larger claim. It is one thing to call for new scholarship, quite another to summon into existence the intellectual community necessary to that end. Yet, that is the goal for which Loretta Mannucci has been laboring for two decades. As I have read through the volumes of the Quaderni, I have been astonished at the remarkable vision of community articulated in her prefaces, essays, and editorial work. And this model, I suggest, has much to offer scholars, still rooted in their national specializations, yet moving into a transnational world.

Consider the opening vignette Loretta offers in the introduction to Quaderno 1. In July 1856, a young girl in upstate New York recorded in her diary a conversation she had that night. "Grandfather was asking us . . . how many things we could remember," thirteen-year-old Caroline Cowles wrote, "and I told him I could remember when Zachary Taylor died, and our church was draped in black . . . ." The old man was pleased at the recollection. His own memory went back to the deaths of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin; he was a child of seven at the great Philadelphian's demise, as was Caroline at the President's passing. For her retentive mind, the young girl won the grandfather's praise. "He said I did very well, considering." Why start a volume on Making, Unmaking, and Remaking America with this small episode? For Loretta, it disclosed "the conscious creation of the category of memory." Under patriarchal tutelage, a teenage girl acquired a distinct sense of citizenship, linking her personal growth to the development of the nation. Her experience typified a crucial component of national identity: the alignment of individual biography with "national time." The obscure life of the one derived meaning from the dramatic events of the other.

Now take other cultural texts dissected in Loretta's writings: first, the spontaneous procession of Boston workingmen in February 1788, celebrating the state's ratification of the Constitution, during which marchers proudly displayed the tools of their trade and thereby proclaimed loyalty to an artisan's republic; next, Susan Merritt's painting from the early 1850s of a Fourth of July picnic, which expressed an "anarchic" vision of a female republic, with free individuals – men, women, and children, blacks and whites – coming together onto a "fair field of folk." These analyses are distinguished by close attention to concrete, physical details, encapsulated in the organization of space, the deportment of bodies, the images of work. The individual is not subsumed into a general idea. Rather, in contrast to Caroline Cowles, the figures employ national symbols not to define the self, but rather as resources in the assertion of distinctive political visions. So, too, in other vignette does Loretta convey appreciation for individual resilience in the past, most memorably, in images of her mother as a young factory girl, "laughing, free in despite of historic closures. A revolution in herself, propagating laughter and subversion," and of her father rising early in the cold New England winter to go off to the factory, and as he left, rousing a sleepy daughter with the brave summons, "Up and at 'em!"

In these anecdotes, Loretta Mannucci exposes the bedrock of experience in her approach to the past. Animating such analysis are the twin themes of hope and memory, the one carrying dreams of the future, the other retaining memories of intense struggle. "What happens to people who come of age in a moment of historical fracture," she asks, "when everything seems open to choice and possibility – individual and collective – almost limitless? What do they do – where do they 'go' – when the shooting is over?" Far from forgetting the past, even as "the years and daily tasks shut the doors one by one," they cherish fleeting moments of experience and build community in their everyday lives.

That is, to my mind, the answer to the dilemma posed by Drummond Bone in his perceptive account of "Nationalism and Literary Fish" (Quaderno 3). How can we study particular texts, episodes, or persons as containers of cultural meaning, without reducing them to expressions of a larger idea? That is the moral danger of nationalism, as it has been played out disastrously for more than a century. It is countered by insisting on the unique worth of the single individual, even as we analyze that life for clues to a broader culture. That is the approach in Loretta Mannucci's scholarship and in her guidance of the Milan Group. Frontiers, she knows, are spaces onto which to project ideal visions of community. But those anticipations must be grounded in experience to have a prayer of realization. "A revolution," she observes, "proposes a break towards a new whose construction needs . . . use what tools and materials are here to hand." So it is with calls for a new world of transnational scholars. Under Loretta's guidance, the Milan Group has started with historians as they are already constituted – students of a national past – and fostered a cosmopolitan exchange, in hopes of developing comparative views. As a collection of scholars, it is tied to a concrete place, to which we return every two years. It aspires to community, but in its far-flung membership, designates itself simply as a "group." In such conjunction of the local and the cosmopolitan, Loretta Mannucci has created a vision of both doing history and organizing historians for a transnational age. Thanks to her energy and imagination, we go forth well-provisioned onto new intellectual frontiers, scouting an undiscovered future. We might occasionally pause to cherish memories of that effort. But "Up and at 'em!" Like her father, she "invites . . . [us] into history. For each time we choose to shift our legs over the edge of the bed and rise to our feet, we stand not only upon the day, but in history."