Places Like Houses, Banks, and Continents: An Appreciative Reply to the Presidential Address

A house burned in Frankfort, Michigan, a few weeks ago. It was a de-cidedly funky place, an old, green-shuttered, wood, two-story build-ing squatting a few yards from one of the alleys. The house had been cut up into four low-rent apartments, three of which were occupied by students and young working people. The fourth was used by the county as transitional housing, and a homeless family with children was scheduled to move in soon. They would not likely have escaped the flames, so in town it is considered a blessing that they had not yet made the place their home. The fire started in the kitchen of one of the units, and it rapidly consumed the wood, which had been drying out for close to a century. Everyone knew the place was a firetrap. The Frankfort firefighters had to be reinforced by those from nearby Elberta and Benzonia. They worked through the frigid night, while the occupants stood, barely clothed, in nine inches of snow, and watched their worldly goods disintegrate. Later, I watched as a machine tore the remnants of the house to pieces, loaded it into industrial dumpsters, and then cleared and leveled the entire area. An improbably surviving pine tree stood in the middle of the lot, and it defined a new emptiness. What had once been a familiar place had now become an unfamiliar space, a vacant lot, a void. The newcomer who walks through the alley tomorrow may understand that this was once a place, with a hybrid history of change, but it is not likely that the newcomer will ever actually know that history. Here, men and women lived and laughed, loved and argued, and here, in this now empty spot, they experienced horror, trauma, and grief for the loss of what once was. I tell this story to myself as much as I tell it to you, in the hopes that it will reveal to me exactly why—to my own surprise—I find myself sympathizing with the "conservative" forces that take a beating in the opening pages of Karen Halttunen's exceptional presidential address. It has much to do with the experience of place, and of loss, of that I am certain. Before meditating further on and from this lost clapboard, though, it is worth resting for a moment on the big picture that is the aim of every presidential address.

This address revolves around two distinct ideas. First, Halttunen would have us return to the ground, as it were, through an engagement with issues of space and place, ideas that she insists are critical to the kinds of global and international directions reflected in so much current American studies scholarship. Second, she suggests that the notion of scholarly engagement with the world—another American studies imperative—also return to ground, to a true and equal partnership with our teaching colleagues in the K-16 classroom.

For Halttunen, the common desire that American studies scholarship have political consequence ought not be played out in intellectual abstraction, but with a very particular kind of grounding, one centered in education and community. She is not interested in ivory tower "political interventions," in which scholarship speaks primarily to audiences of the like-minded. Nor is she interested in encouraging university faculty to enter local communities as leaders, organizers, and facilitators. Rather, her own experience learning from and with those doing the grunt work of American education—hard-working and underpaid K-16 classroom teachers—leads her to a locally engaged politics of knowledge and pedagogy, one highly appropriate to a broadly imagined American Studies Association membership. This interest, in turn, opens up for her a host of local collaborative projects developed under programs such as "Arts of Citizenship," "Local Communities, American Communities," "Keeping and Creating American Communities," and others. There are a number of reasons why this kind of grounded engagement ought to make sense to the American academy, from pipeline and preparedness issues among students to the marginalization that many of our public universities experience in relation to the...