James Arthur Miller (1944–2015)

Fig 1.

James Miller, during an event at George Washington University celebrating the career and work of John Vlach, 28 February 2013. Photo by William R. Ferris.

Which roles have literature, music, art and film played in the struggle for equality and social justice, and what are the political roles they should be playing? What does it mean for Humanists to say that race is a social construction, and can one imagine a flexible, non-essentialist definition of race that also acknowledges the continued American obsession with it? How can a sense of modest irony make college and university teachers recognize that there is enormous variety in students' often unpredictable responses to aesthetic works? How can a specifically local focus in American Studies generate new knowledge and motivate students at the same time? What is the mission of African American Studies now, in the academy as well as in the public arena, in national as well as international contexts? These are among the many questions that Jim Miller addressed in his life's work, his scholarly publications, his teaching, his book-reviewing, his televised public appearances, and his academic lecturing, in the United States as well as in many other places – for his career took him to Barbados, Trinidad, Ireland, Great Britain, Holland, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Belarus, Turkey, South Africa, India, Japan, and Korea.

Two central points of orientation through which he sought answers to his questions were the writer Richard Wright and the case of the Scottsboro trial. Having tackled with Wright and the issue of identity in his 1976 State University of New York at Buffalo dissertation, written under the direction of Bruce Jackson, Jim kept returning to Wright at various times in his career, during which he always went on teaching Wright's important and famous novel, Native Son, set in Chicago of the 1930s. He registered carefully how this novel as well as its protagonist, the African American chauffeur Bigger Thomas, who first accidentally kills his employer's daughter Mary and, as a hunted man, rapes and kills his girl friend Bessie, has remained provocative for students over the years – even though the nature of the provocation changed. Jim described the tense climate in 1968 around 'the question of who had the right to teach it … , to criticize it'. Jim found, when he came to class, that his white students 'had been expelled by a militant faction of black nationalists'. Two white students had remained in the class, however: a Jewish student who identified with Bigger's lawyer Boris Max, and a working-class Italian-American who saw himself in Jan Erlone, a young communist who was Mary's boyfriend but forgives Bigger. Jim's assessment was: 'We never did discuss Native Son, but I did learn a great deal about the ways in which this novel polarizes its readers'. Later student generations were less divided on matters of identity but more on the issue of whether Bigger Thomas was a victim or a rebel, a hero or a criminal, some regarding him as a 'touchstone of moral and political commitment', while others 'called for his immediate execution'. Later on the focus of class discussions shifted again, from the social and political concerns implied by the novel to the issue of gender, most especially in Wright's treatment of Bigger's victim Bessie, which now appeared as an indication of Wright's supposed misogyny. Wright thus served as a literary-historical-political litmus test, for he kept (and keeps) making students uncomfortable. As Heather Hathaway, one of Jim's former students, wrote, Jim enjoyed such moments in class and did not bridge any spell of awkward silence, but rather loved to extend it. Until students themselves would be able to break the spell, Jim would remain silent or simply say, with a bemused smile on his face, 'isn't discomfort a wonderful thing?' Made curious about how other teachers were experiencing Wright in their various classroom settings, Jim edited the collection Approaches to Teaching Wright's Native Son (1997) for the Modern Language Association. Jim spoke...