I have to say, I have not been as productive this second half of the summer as I had hoped. The plan was to come back in the fall with a good solid draft of my first chapter. That could still happen, I suppose, but it probably going to require some serious writing when I get back to Los Angeles next week.
On the non-essential productivity front, however, I spent all day yesterday at the Library of Congress, poking around in the organizational archives of the NAACP. It was a really random idea: a historian who works on McCarthyism noted in some footnote that it might be interesting to research how McCarthyism affected the NAACP. That's interesting in itself, first of all, but it also occurred to me that the NAACP might be a good source of discourse on mainstream, respectable African-American life of the early fifties, the same sort of discourse of which my sweet gospel people were also part (that is, as opposed to those surly R&B types that we all know and love today.) Maybe there would be interesting representations of African-American masculinity, some fun pamphlets or something, I don't know. It just seemed like maybe I could poke around in the archives, and maybe something interesting would turn up.
Did anything turn up? Stay tuned for the dissertation!
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2 comments:
That's funny. I went to a play last night that has a rousing final scene from the transcript of Paul Robeson's McCarthy hearing that was fascinating in talking about the relationship between race and McCarthyism. If you haven't read that transcripts, you totally should. We should talk about it when you're back in LA. I'm frantically trying to get a draft of my second chapter in working order before school starts, so we can sympathize.
That soundslike good work to me. Congrats on making this important connection!
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