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Candidate Statement 2015

Page history last edited by Steven A Carr 9 years ago

stevenalancarr.pbworks.com

 

Thank you for agreeing to participate as an external reviewer in a process that ultimately will consider whether my work is suitable for promotion to Professor on the basis of excellence in research. Though others will make it, this will be the second most important decision of my academic career. The first and most important one, in 2000, resulted in being tenured and promoted to Associate Professor. Being fortunate enough to know that I had job security and a lifetime guarantee of employment, I was able to fully devote my attention to realizing two career milestones: completing my first book project, and embarking on a second one. Cambridge University Press published Hollywood and Anti-Semitism: A Cultural History Up to World War II in 2001. Then, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum awarded me a residential fellowship in 2002-03 to begin a career-spanning project devoted to Hollywood and the Holocaust.

 

I would like to say that since 2002, my career occurred neatly along a single cause-and-effect trajectory. It has not. I would like to say that such momentous decisions as promotion or tenure have occurred because of actual accomplishments. In my case, that is true, but only to some extent. Our campus criteria document states that promotion from Associate Professor to Professor should occur when "candidates will have made important and recognized contributions..." (SD 88-25). On the one hand, my ongoing record of scholarship - seven invited book chapters in blind, peer reviewed edited anthologies; one invited essay in a scholarly journal; two papers published in conference proceedings; and yet another recently proposed book project co-authored with Jennifer Frost and under contract with Rowman and Littlefield on the social problem film  -  all meet the standard for excellence in research as outlined in my department's criteria document. Yet if I am truly honest, this record of a developing body of work on Hollywood and the Holocaust seems more poised as a penultimate achievement before the eventual goal: to publish the book-length history I originally had proposed to the Holocaust Museum in 2002.

 

The materials sent to you include only published work that underwent a blind, peer reviewed process. I hope it shows both incremental advancements and genuine accomplishments in how my thinking about Hollywood and the Holocaust has changed since 2002. Though I make both published and unpublished work freely available via stevenalancarr.pbworks.com, and I will happily provide you with additional samples of my research including the book prospectus and unpublished papers that will form the basis of book chapters, the comprehensive historical narrative of Hollywood and the Holocaust that has occupied most of my professional career is only now nearing completion. After inviting me to do so, I submitted a prospectus to Indiana University Press in December 2014, and I am waiting to hear back from them.

 

So, the seven published essays included in this packet and presented in reverse chronological order represent more of a continuity bridging my earlier work on Hollywood and anti-Semitism to my latest and personally significant project: a proposed book currently under review with Indiana U P on the response of 1930s and 40s Hollywood to growing public awareness of the Holocaust and Nazi anti-Semitism. In 2013, a recent and somewhat futile public debate over whether Hollywood collaborated with Nazi Germany demonstrated the still urgent need for thoughtful and reflective scholarship on the subject of Hollywood and the Holocaust. That debate not only demonstrated the need for archival scholarship informed by historical context. It also helped clarify and sharpen what the debate needed, namely a historical narrative that did not treat Hollywood and Nazis as an interchangeable surrogate for Hollywood and the Holocaust. Developing out of my research on the cultural logic of anti-Semitic accusations of Jewish control over Hollywood, the endlessly complex, contested, and protean story of Hollywood's evolving response to Nazi anti-Semitism and the Holocaust does not fit neatly into a ready-made package, and I have no illusions that a single monograph will have the final word on this history. What I do hope is that a scholarly trajectory spanning more than a dozen or so years of writing about the cultural memory of the Holocaust, as well as the historicity of the Holocaust in and around film, will show that I now am ready begin to treat the subject both with the careful thought and full reverence that this topic deserves. I therefore hope to base a case for excellence in research on this ongoing record of research and scholarly productivity that has resulted in many published essays, but which ultimately will lead to the book-length project I first proposed in 2002. As more recent events have shown, this project is still very much needed.

 

The essays included in this packet make specific arguments that characterize the approach I take with regard to Hollywood and the Holocaust. In "Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in American Film", I used a series of small case studies based on both original and previous research to argue the need to move beyond a so-called "reflection paradigm" that conceives of immigrant, ethnic, and racial identities in film. Rather than functioning as discrete entities, these identities operated "within diffuse, multiple, and overlapping networks of imagined relationships" that could occur both in and outside film. For example, in "Jew and Not-Jew", I argued that my view of Crossfire (RKO, 1947) and Gentleman's Agreement (20th Century-Fox, 1947) had changed since Hollywood and Anti-Semitism. Rather than see those films only in terms of their condemnation of anti-Semitism as pathological aberration, by leaving discussion of the Holocaust noticeably absent, these films promoted a vision of a permeable American democracy that easily could accommodate the freedoms of everyday American citizens who just happened to be Jewish. In "Staying for Time", I advocated taking a reception-based approach to understand the presence of atrocity footage in cultural memory. The essay called for an inversion of "the typical paradigm emphasizing image over context" as a way to reveal a certain "mythology surrounding films depicting Holocaust atrocity" that could create particular meanings for audiences (59). "Wretched Refuse" developed the concept of how an overarching narrative calling for the escape from and even erasure of immigrant ethnic identities, as manifest in Street Scene (United Artists, 1931) and Dead End (United Artists, 1937), could reach into the future with real consequences for various ethnicities living in actual ethnic neighborhoods. "Mass Murder, Modernity, and the Alienated Gaze" developed the idea that such large-scale paradigmatic responses could play out both in intentional and unintentional ways, particularly when those responses embodied viewers'  cultural alienation from photographic records of atrocity. The notion of the gaze as an aggregate complex of both looking at and looking through the sexuality of Jewish boys was the subject of "L.I.E, The Believer, and the Sexuality of the Jewish Boy". And finally, in a reading of two 1990s film adaptations of Les Miserables, "The Holocaust in the Text" argued for looking "at the ways in which the Holocaust speaks through texts" (51) and not just addressing the Holocaust as only residing, in a literal way, within those texts.

 

I hope this record of scholarship shows both the need to reconsider the typical ways in which Hollywood and the Holocaust get discussed, and the need to pursue new approaches in studying the subject. In 2002, one could still write a history of the subject that offered an inventory films depicting the Holocaust, and then perform a close reading on some of them. In 2015, the history of this subject still demands writing, but it must move beyond a "reflection paradigm". It must consider the multiple and permeable ways in which audiences imagine themselves. It must find new ways to historicize atrocity footage that has only recently achieved iconic status. It must consider how large-scale narratives and gazes configure audiences. And it must search for how the Holocaust speaks through mediated texts as well as account for the texts that literally or self-consciously reference the Holocaust.

 

Once again, thank you for your willingness to serve in your capacity as an external reviewer, as an evaluator of my work, and as an integral part of the process for promotion to Professor.

 

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