Glickman Library Special Collections

The curator of Special Collections is Susie Bock. Call her at 780- 4269 to schedule a visit (or two) from your class. Susie would also be glad to talk to individual instructors about the collection and what might fit with the readings a particular section is using.

The website, http://library.usm.maine.edu/speccoll/index.html, describes more of the collection.

Items and Readings to Sequence

1. A quilt made by an American Slave.

(The collection also contains objects from the women’s auxiliary of Maine chapters of the KKK, which might help to make the distinction between slavery and succeeding problems that students often have difficulty with when reading the Walker).

Sequence with Literacies

a) Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use”

Is keeping an item for “everyday use” a good thing? When is it better to keep something for use than to put it in a museum? Describe your experience looking at the quilt. Explain how you think Walker or one of her characters would see your response. What would this character say about the class’s visit to the library?

b) James Clifford’s “Incidents of Tourism in Chiapas and Yucatan”

Clifford describes “tourist ‘herds’ in buses. Safe in their literal bubble. . . The somehow inspiring colors of walls and houses. Pleasures of ignorance. The nameless plants. . .Invisible birds crying in the palms”(142). Is your experience of looking at the quilt describable in any of the same terms? Is there anything “inspiring” about it? Are there pleasures in ignorance? What are they?

c) Ann Fineup-Riordan, “Yup’ik Lives and How we See Them.”

Just use the second part of this essay, beginning on p. 212: “Robert Redford, Apanuugpak, and the Invention of Tradition.”

Fienup-Riordan describes an “invented tradition” as “a set of practices governed by accepted rules and of a symbolic nature that seeks to inculcate certain values implying continuity with the past”(228). Invented traditions are different from “genuine traditions,” old ways which are “alive and viable” and don’t need to be “adapted or invented”(228).

This semester, you have read and written about slaves, fictional southerners, Mexicans, tourists, and Alaskans. Has your reading and writing been part of an “invented tradition” or a “genuine tradition”? Do you share a connection to the past of any of these people as a Mainer, or a North American, or a member of the human race? Or is this course attempting to invent a tradition for you? Is a genuine tradition better than an invented tradition, or vice versa?