Glenn Hendler co-edits Keywords for Capitol Insurrection

In an effort to better understand the events that took place in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021, Fordham English Professor Glenn Hendler and his collaborator, Professor Bruce Burgett of the University of Washington, turned to the project they co-edit, Keywords for American Cultural Studies, which consists of over 120 essays, each about a different word essential for an analysis of American culture, each by a different author. They asked several authors of those essays to expand on their ideas in Keywords in response to current events, and the result was "Keywords Now," a cluster of short commentaries that you can read here.

The cover for the third edition of Keywords for American Cultural Studies

The first thing you'll see is an introduction, co-written by Professor Hendler with Burgett, that asks what it means that we can't even agree on what to call the events at the Capitol building. Hendler and Burgett then make the case that close attention to the varying words being used to talk about current events--the kind of close attention to language that is the hallmark of an English major and of literary scholarship--can help us better understand those events. And that is what "Keywords Now" is meant to inspire. Written by prominent scholars in different disciplines--English, History, Political Science, Ethnic Studies, American Studies, Afriican American Studies--these essays, and the slightly longer keyword essays linked to them, can provoke that attention to language. You may agree or disagree with the particular arguments made here (Were those who stormed the Capitol best described as "conservative?" Is it accurate or useful to call the Trumpian wing of the Republican Party "populist?"), but Hendler hopes they will help us understand these debates better. 

In addition to the "Introduction to Keywords Now" written by Hendler and Burgett, the posts in the cluster are:

"Conservativism," by Angela D. Dillard, who is Richard A. Meisler Collegiate Professor of Afroamerican & African Studies at University of Michigan. She is the author of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Now?: Multicultural Conservatism in America and Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit.

"Fascism," by Rebecca Hill, who is Professor of American Studies at Kennesaw State University.  She is the author of Men, Mobs and Law: Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History and coeditor of Teaching American Studies: State of the Classroom as State of the Field.  

"Intersectionality and Populism," by Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph Lowndes. HoSang is Associate Professor of Ethnicity, Race & Migration and American Studies at Yale University.  Lowndes is Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon and the author of From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism. Together Lowndes and HoSang wrote  Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity.

"Whiteness," by Lee Bebout. He is  Professor of English and affiliate faculty with the School of Transborder Studies, the School of Social Transformation, and the Program in American Studies at the University of Arizona, and the author of Mythohistorical Interventions: The Chicano Movement and Its Legacies and Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the US Racial Imagination in Brown and White.