The Conspiracy of Culture
/I don’t do personal posts very often, but this one is going to dig a bit into family history. If you are not interested in learning more about ME, you probably should skip it. I make no apologies. This is MY blog after all!
This semester, I co-taught an enormously rewarding class through the specialized arts and culture journalism program with my remarkable colleague, Sasha Anawalt. Sasha was retiring this term so we pulled out all of the stops: both of us tapped our networks to bring in some of the people whose work on contemporary culture and politics inspired us. We wanted to expand student’s thinking about what topics feel under “arts and culture,” shattering any preconceptions about the lines between high and low culture, and linking culture to contemporary struggles over racial justice. We encouraged students to think through these topics together via dialogic writing which worked better than I could have ever imagined and is going to be a staple of my own teaching for now on. As the course drew to a close, students worked in teams to express outward facing perspectives on what they had learned through staging contemporary preconceptions of the depression era Living Newspaper tradition. And inspired by the work of anthropologist Daniel Miller, my Comics and Stuff book, Sasha’s interest in still life, and a series of visits from assemblage artist Dominique Moody, they were to reflect on the “stuff” — material and emotional — that they have surrounded themselves with during the pandemic by creating their own Cornel Boxes (broadly defined). Sasha and I decided we would also do this last assignment alongside our students. Today I want to share my creative project — The Conspiracy of Culture — and what it taught me about cultural connection across four generations in my own family.
The central metaphor here is the conspiracy board (and its resemblance to more traditional mapping of the family tree). I am interested in conspiracy boards because they follow a logic of hidden connections — ultimately everything is connected in countless ways to everything else — and the never-ending search for meaning, constituting the perfect semiotic machine. In this case, I wanted to map not simply the connections of marriage and parenthood that shape most family trees but the process of enculturation as it plays out across four generations in my family. I should acknowledge that my approach here is pretty patriarchal — I did not try to map my mother’s side of the family or my wife’s, both of which would require another board or two. My choice was shaped by what the family calls “the four Henrys.”
My grandfather — Henry Guy Jenkins Sr., who went by H.G., my father — Henry Guy Jenkins Jr., who went by Guy, myself — Henry Guy Jenkins III, and my Son, Henry Guy Jenkins IV — who now goes by Charlie are connected to each other by our shared name. We were lucky to capture a range of photographs of the four of us before my grandfather passed away. And those images are some of the ones I treasure the most. I wrote about my grandfather in my contribution to Renee Hobbs’ book, Exploring the Roots of Digital and Media Literacy Through Personal Narrative. So, my project here centers on the four Henrys and our respective relationship to popular culture. I was inspired in part by the assemblage of artifacts we found in my grandfather’s desk drawer when he passed away — his union card as a sheet metal worker, a copy of the King James Bible which this man with a fourth grade education marked each time he read it cover to cover, FDR’s collected speeches, and a postcard of the populist 1930s comedian Will Rogers. This is a perfect snapshot of the life of a man who left the farm to be a quartermaster during World War I and went to live in Atlanta after his return: a southern “blue dog” Democrat, a working man, a religious man.[ Using these objects as a starting point, I made a list of core cultural interests for each member of my immediate family focusing particularly on shared links across generations. I was not able to fit everything i identified on the board for space constraints, but I was able to include a representative sample. I worked with my son to compare our respective memories since I knew we each would have distinctive relations with the core family members. Charlie and Cynthia also helped me track down materials, most of which could be found somewhere in my pack-rat apartment but I was on the other side of the country.
As we began making links, sometimes across multiple generations, we found it challenging to know how to express different kinds of relationships. For example, my grandmother was a huge wrestling fan, going back to the 1950s, and I have vivid memories of her pounding on the coffee table as she watched what was happening in the ring. This interest largely skipped several generations — my mother once dated Freddy Miller — who was a long-time ringside announcer in Atlanta and I have ended up writing several essays on wrestling though my interest faded pretty quickly — to get to my son, who has been a hardcore fan for decades. Here, for example, is a photograph of his well worn WWE ring, an artifact of his childhood. Somewhere — in storage — he has a large collection of related action figures.
Should we see a causal relationship here, even though she only knew my son as a baby, or may we simply assume that the shared interest is largely coincidental?
How might we understand shared tastes among several generation of women in the family, especially where the tastes were fully formed before they married into the Jenkins clan? It’s possible of course that these shared interests are part of the habitus that made the relationships possible or desirable, even if they were acquired under different circumstances. For example, Star Trek was one of the factors that brought my wife and I together though we were both Trek fans when we met. Both of our parents were regular viewers and we both were introduced to “classic” Trek as it was first airing. My wife introduced me to the world of Trek fanzines which inspired me to write Textual Poachers. Both of our brothers are also Trek enthusiasts, and it is one of the cultural connections between my brother and I in a relationship generally defined around our differences rather than our commonalities. My son also has enjoyed watching Trek though overall he is less a fan than his parents. How than can colored yarn capture the nuances of causality, historical context, and degrees of intensity suggested by this example?
Yet confronting the limits of these modes of representation forced me to think through these connections in the first place and I made a number of discoveries along the way.I had anticipated for example that the number of strings connecting to the Left side of the board, where my grandparents are, would be fewer than those on the Right side which represent the currently living generations. In part, this is because memories fade and because my son’s generation in the family barely knew my grandmother who died in their early childhood or even my grandfather who lived almost a decade after. And to a large degree, this proved to be the case, but the project led me to a reconciliation of sorts with my grandmother whose influence on my life had been partially forgotten. Let’s start with some artifacts from my own childhood — two stuffed toys, a clown and a hobo, which I have treasured and protected few the years.
To understand the significance of these figures, you need to know, first of all, that my mother performed as a clown for charity and church events, that I also performed as a clown with her when I was a toddler, and that my mother’s best friend painted a portrait of her in her clown costume, making the maternal connection to clowning pretty inevitable.
The stuffed toys, however, were hand-made (from a kit) by my grandmother, who loved to sew, to crochet, to make afghans and quilts, to design hats, and so forth. So, there is also a strong connection to trace there. (Dominique Moody noted that my use of yarn to make my project connects it back to my grandmother’s “afghans,” a link I had not considered). But as I was planning this project, I remembered that I first saw the films of Charlie Chaplin and other silent clowns on television at her house, suggesting that the choice of the “hobo” as I always called him or “the tramp” was not coincidental. These were films she loved from her own youth and wanted to make sure were passed down to me. And it was the tramp figure that I really cared for, sleeping with it later in life than my brother saw as appropriate, whispering my secrets into his ear well into middle school. I had anticipated more connections with my mother who would go to movies and dinner with me while my father and brother went deer hunting, and this is largely the case, but somehow I had forgotten how bound up my grandmother was in my love of cinema, and suddenly memories of going to movies with her also came pouring out.
Given this history, it seems over-determined that I would write my dissertation on screen comedy — in this case, the vaudeville influence on the early sound cinema. But then What Made Pistachio Nuts? was dedicated to my grandfather, whose cultural imaginary was defined by the depression era and thus set me on the path to being myself interested in media from that period (And thus the postcard of Will Rogers I sent him when I visited the comedian’s house in Oklahoma while I was in high school or why this visit was so important to me in the first place. Most people today do not know who Will Rogers was..)
Other determinants here did not come directly from my father’s family: a box of World War II era Life magazines found in a trunk at my mother’s homestead, a local children’s show that played vintage slapstick comedies rather than cartoons, a local radio station that played old-time radio comedies, the republication of Liberty magazine in the 1970s… All of these things brought me back again and again to early 20th century history and culture.
As I reflected back on my experience watching television at my grandparents’ house, I made another connection. When we visited them on Sunday afternoons, we often ended up watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Animal Kingdom. Could this be why my first real job was at the Atlanta zoo or why I have had a life long fascination with animals and zoos (which I visit around the world)? It now seems to me more likely than not, but the thought had never crossed my mind.
If the stuffed toys offered a clue into a whole range of cultural exchanges, leading ultimately to my dissertation and book, we can go outward from the books (which often emerge from strong personal connections to the material) to family history. We might understand Textual Poachers to my wife’s involvement with fandom or my hazy memories of falling asleep watching Trek with my father, but it would also be connected to an older cousin, George, who was actively involved with the Atlanta science fiction scene in his teens and twenties, though excluding my mother’s family line from the conspiracy board means I can’t indicate those connections here. My involvement with Science Fiction Audiences which studied fandoms and audiences around Star Trek and Doctor Who can not be isolated from the fact my son and wife were obsessed with the British science fiction series (still are) and that my father made my son his own Tardis playhouse or that he went out trick or treating one year dressed as Jon Pertwee.
In my recent book, Comics and Stuff, I mention my father’s Pogo books, which I still cherish, even though I have most of this material in better editions.
Pogo was meaningful to my father in part because it was one of the few national cultural productions which was set in Georgia and because it was popular when he was a student at Georgia Tech in the 1950s. In fact, my mother drew a portrait of Pogo ‘Possum which hung behind his desk when he was a student and now hangs on the wall of my USC office.
A still like this one from the recent documentary, Wolfman’s Got Nards, about the cult that grew up around Monster Squad may also be read as a nexus across generations. My participation reflects my involvement in the 1960s monster culture, an interest I passed along to my son, who was the right generation to see Monster Squad when it was first released. In front of me on the desk are Dracula and Wolfman, two of the Aurora monster models my father helped me to build and paint in the late 1960s, alongside the Creature of the Black Lagoon, which I had given to my son, who has been fascinated by the character ever since I took him to see the film at the Egyptian.
And we might extend the connections down to my son’s love of horror writer Steven King, which puts his own spin on the cross-generational fascination with monsters. But we would also have to point to my wife who introduced him to Dark Shadows, reopening an old wound in my heart, since I was disappointed when my interest in Universal Monsters were upstaged by the Dark Shadow craze among my late elementary school classmates.
I was fascinated to find this photograph of my father as a boy wearing cowboy clothes, having evaded, and then finally succumbed to westerns, when I was in graduate school. Westerns were not watched in my household growing up. But connections across generations are more common, as in my mother’s love of Walt Disney translates in different ways to my brother’s (and his offspring’s) constant pilgrimages to Disney World and my own fixation with Ludwig Von Drake (shown here on a bank my son gave me for Christmas) who was my first role model for a professor.
I claim to look more like him with each passing year.
The earlier generation of women in the family have a strong association with crafts — from my grandmother’s hats (shown here in this picture) to my mother’s Bob Ross dabling with a paint brush to produce pictures of birds and flowers. Her art was always copied from other’s originals, though she had the talent — but not the confidence — to be able to create original work herself
The men are associated with tools — from the crosses, stars, boxes, and balls my grandfather crafted from metal to my father’s constant puttering in his basement workroom to my brother’s pride in his trucks (which he passed down to his sons). So, where do we situate my wife’s glassblowing — as a craft or as work with tools?
And where do I situate myself, since I am neither crafty nor handy with tools? I recall a moment when my father took me to a church he had built twenty years before (through the family construction company) and asked me what I could make which would last twenty years. The result was more intimidation than inspiration — a sense that nothing I could do would be valued unless it had this level of monumentality. I can’t begin to capture the laughter of triumph when Textual Poachers was released in a 20th anniversary edition, though my father did not live long enough to see it. My son seems to have inherited my aversion to both crafts and tools and my expression through writing.
We could go around and around the board, tracing these connections, showing how families are forged through shared cultural memories (the debates my father and I used to have following the airing of each new All in the Family episodes), how familiar consumer products become parts of shared rituals. My grandmother kept a roll of rainbow colored lifesavers in her purse and would give me one midway each church service, as she kept me calm while my mother sang in the choir and my father counted the money as a Baptist deacon. I recall looking ahead to see which flavor I would get the following week. All of this is to say that, following Raymond Williams, “culture is ordinary” and that the products of mass media become meaningful as a result of our relationships with each other. This is what I meant to communicate to my students through “The Conspiracy of Culture.”
My grandmother introduced me to Chaplin, she smuggled candy into the church to comfort me, but she also was the source of much of the Lost Cause ideology that engulfed me growing up. She was raised by her grandfather who had fought with the confederacy (a fact I share with discomfort today) and even more uncomfortably, was said to have owned slaves. I represented her taste in music here through Tennessee Ernie Ford’s Songs of the Confederacy. She is also the person who introduced me to Song of the South (another Georgia related property) and on the same date, took me up to the nose bleed section of the Fox Theater to show me the wall which once segregated off Black patrons. She brought me to the Atlanta Cyclorama which depicts the Battle of Atlanta and she pointed to a particular figure which she said represented my grandfather. This could not be literally true given people did not stop and pose for a portrait of the battle. But I always assumed he had performed a similar ritual of grounding his own experience in the painting. This was a moment of intense cross-generational transfer forever anchored in my memories today, even though I could not now replicate the gesture and point my son to the right spot. She wanted me to know “who I was” and “where I had come from.” As a young man, I was intensely proud of that connection with the Confederacy even as I was also actively learning as much as I could about the Black civil rights movement as it was taking place around me. I struggled to overcome the racism in the culture around me but I held onto symbols of my “heritage” which the Lost Cause ideology allowed me to isolate from overt forms of white supremacy. Now, I struggle to shed the residual of the Lost Cause ideology that flairs up at odd moments — a nostalgia for markers of regional identity that became associated with the Civil War era. Intellectually, I understand they are problematic, but emotionally, they still feel a part of me.
As I sat there, staring at the conspiracy chart, I did not know how to mark those connections — as a frayed yarn that I was struggle to severe? As we pass culture from one generation to the next, there is much that we love and cherish and somethings we need to shed and shred. Often both are handed down to us by the same people. This is also the conspiracy of culture.
