It is difficult to know what to blog about since much of what we read in Robert Gross's introduction to An Extensive Republic is familiar from reading Starr and Davidson. But I did find one intriguing idea that merits exploration -- or at least it is interesting to me so I am going to blog about it. This idea specifically is that while print was unifying the nation and homogenizing our culture, certain people were still left out of the conversation about building the new nation. For example, Gross points out that Godey's and Graham's both positioned themselves as mainstream periodicals, yet neither one ever made mention of slavery and abolition before the Civil War (50). How can we have an "extensive republic" if important voices are left out? And how can we call ourselves "democratic" when the voices of the powerful elite (such as southern plantation owners) dictate the content of periodicals and the print culture they produce?
Luckily for us, some of those excluded voices were included in the conversation thanks to powerful mentors. (While these examples are a little bit later than the time period we have been discussing, I hope you will accept my ideas on their merit.) For example, Harriet Jacobs' voice were heard thanks to Lydia Maria Child. Her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl gives us an important insider view on the horrors of slavery, especially for women. The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, facilitated by mentors like William Lloyd Garrison, allowed Douglass' voice to be heard and become part of the conversation about slavery. Both Jacobs and Douglass point out that slavery degrades everyone -- the enslaved and the enslavers. Indeed, both show how the entire nation was "degraded" by slavery. Thanks to the hugely popular novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, and its other iterations, the nation began to realize the horrors occurring because of slavery. Print culture was pivotal in ending slavery and bringing about emancipation in 1863.
Likewise, I have been thinking about how inclusion and exclusion still happen today. For example, our print culture is still wrestling with the questions about what voices should be heard and how they should shape our nation. The recent protests known as the Occupy Wall Street movement are an exciting example of how print culture allows the "weak" --those outside the positions of power -- to have a voice. From their website, they describe themselves this way: "Occupy Wall Street is a people-powered movement that began on September 17, 2011 in Liberty Square in Manhattan’s Financial District, and has spread to over 100 cities in the United States and actions in over 1,500 cities globally. #OWS is fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process, and the role of Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations. The movement is inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, and aims to expose how the richest 1% of people are writing the rules of an unfair global economy that is foreclosing on our future." http://occupywallst.org/
Thanks to social media the movement is spreading quickly. Hopefully, real change will happen and our country will begin to find ways to bring us back to a society that truly is governed by the people and for the people, a society where teachers can make a living wage, and where graduate students can get funding. A society were those who were ignored will be heard -- and thanks to the exploding electronic print culture, I can write these thoughts, post them on my blog, and anyone in the world with internet access can read them. Amazing!
If you want to think about the explosion of print culture and information in more detail, watch EPIC 2015 on YouTube.
Thanks for this post, Larisa! I blogged about something similar, albeit in a more abstract and far less concrete way, and I did not link to the same problems we find ourselves having regarding inclusion/exclusion of different voices in the press today. I agree that the advent of new forms of social media have helped offer new venues for those previously silenced to finally be heard. Change, I hope, is indeed on the horizon.
ReplyDeleteLarisa:
ReplyDeleteI like the connection you've made between Gross (and Starr/Davidson) the OWS movement. It does seem that even in our attempts to democratize print culture (or society in general), we'll always be leaving out certain voices for various reasons. But, to be honest, I don't think we'll ever reach the point where EVERY voice is included, and even if we did, the time required to listen and respond to 300+ million voices would guarantee that some were still ignored/minimized. (Or, on a global scale, more than 7 billion voices.)
That's why I like to think of democracy as a means, not an end -- as a journey and not a destination. As long as we're striving to democratize society, to envoice as many people as possible, then I think we're doing the best we can. There will always be power relations, ideologies, and economic disparities preventing us from full/pure democracy; if we position full democracy as out goal, we set ourselves up for failure and, in the process, ignore or discount many of the gains we're able to make. We just have to keep working to mitigate power differentials and let the rest take care of itself.
--Tom