“That Saves Them the Blessings of Civilization”

The classic Hollywood Western is generally taken to be the antithesis of avant-garde art, a popular genre unaffected by modernism. However, John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) provides an illustrative example of middlebrow American modernist cinema. Influenced by French literary naturalism and German expressionism, Ford’s Western obliquely engages with the ills of modern urban existence and the interrelated “crises of modernity” that characterized the interwar years, when the global viability of liberal democracy was cast into doubt. In Stagecoach, the problems of modernity are treated (diegetically), though not fully cured, by a transformative if dangerous journey into the American Wild West. By integrating the formal innovations of F. W. Murnau’s expressionist style with his own epic and monumental vision of the American west, Ford epitomized an underappreciated form of American vernacular modernism that emerged across the arts in the 1910s, flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, and survived into the post-WWII era.

“Yo’ Kin Cut All Kinda Tricks”: Crossroad Ordeals, Peavine Drills, and Other Technologies of the Self in African-American Vernacular Esotericism

The vernacular magical, divinatory, and healing practices associated with the Afro-American Gulf South, alternately called “Hoodoo” or “Conjure,” offer a window into an intriguing world of “everyday esoterica.” Practitioners envision a world of competing human desires, which move and are moved by an array of malign and benign spiritual forces. They cope with this world with a pharmacopeia of symbolically powerful physical substances, but also through works of bodily discipline, prayer, meditation, and other practices aimed at the cultivation of will, self-awareness, and self-regard. These latter tools and techniques comport closely with Michel Foucault’s concept of technologies of the self. Exploring Hoodoo ritual through Foucault’s lens offers opportunities to re-imagine American Hoodoo as an esoteric system that enables practitioners to manipulate and transform themselves as well as their circumstances. This examination serves to increase our appreciation for the sophistication of these traditions, while simultaneously enlarging and enriching Foucault’s paradigm – offering new ways to consider the techniques by which one might come to know and understand oneself. This inquiry addresses a lacuna in the scholarship of Hoodoo and Conjure and also situates these traditions more firmly (and accurately) within the wider corpus of Gnostic Studies and Western Esotericism.

Ink-Stained Word Coiners

Neologizing journalists such as Damon Runyon, Walter Winchell, and the Alsop brothers auditioned one coinage after another, some of which became part of the national conversation (although most didn’t). Columnists such as David Brooks and Thomas Friedman insistently coin words and phrases, few of which have caught on. Inventing words seems to be an occupational hazard of writing a newspaper column. Damon Runyon and Walter Winchell invented words so prolifically that their patois became known as “Runyonese,” and “Winchellese.” Runyon and Winchell were just one of a long line of newspaper columnists whose colorful coinages and overheard slang became part of the American vernacular. Beatnik originated with San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, southern strategy with Joseph Alsop, and bleeding heart (liberal do-gooders) with Westbrook Pegler.