touring tenements, celebrations and critiques

SALTINES:

Happy Memorial Day - I spent the day with my dad going to the LES Tenement Museum and then to a way-too-much-butter-for-the-heat kind of brunch, then walked over the Williamsburg Bridge while having a life-affirming conversation with someone I then and there realized was one of my best friends.

A few years ago I worked for this weird non-profit in Philly that celebrated 'memoir arts,' and one of the projects we worked on involved paying for transcriptions of this playright's interviews with 'everyday Americans' conducted when he freaked out after 9/11 and drove cross-country trying to figure out what the hell was going on with people in this here nation. Anyway, one of the most amazing transcipts came from his interview with a woman who worked as a guide at a plantation in Mississippi. I've been on those tours too and I always wonder 'what is the imagination that brings someone to work at a place like this?' Re-ennacters in general fascinate me, as does 'experience learning' (which is obviously why I'm an ethnomusicology student and not a historian) and the whole fascination with the physical conjuring up the historical (see my cylinder piece for more on that). What was it about this woman that made her wander the dear ole home in her hoop skirt talking about how back in the old days they didn't make left and right shoes, so the missus just had two generic ones, to which people nod with delight (and i remember doing so) 'huh, i've never known that' . when. they. don't. preserve. the. slave. quarters. hello? has anyone looked out these historically accurate rose colored windows? anyway, the transcript captured this weird woman and her naive ignorance about the goings on of the plantation, as others did about other people's equally ignorant visions about who to blame for 'the events,' giving the playright plenty of fodder for a bad script asking interesting questions about the lies people tell themselves to make sense of the world, and how relative all those lies are to one another.

anyway LES tenement museum. Now there's a weird concept. "never forget" the place of poverty in NYC as it is pushed further and further to the margins, "never forget" how ethnic diversity formed the city and how our president is trying to do away with it, "never forget" the systematic exploitation of the powerless, as if it were somehow a romantic past? the choice to tell the stories of the LES through immigrant voices, oral history, the forgetten is right up my alley, correct, but it all feels so touchy-feely and apolitical - without consequence, domesticated. i see the project in some way in relation to reinserting struggle, oppression and prejudice in ethnic whiteness, but that this struggle seems radically decontexualized (can you just say 'because of this idea of eugenics, race-based quotas restricted certain ethnic groups from enterting the US' without, umm...some context or explaination?) and somehow just off. what is it that bothers me about the tenement museum? does its celebratory function neglect the politics, and is that okay? if it functions as a corrective to the 'history told by the victors' why does assimilation, class mobility and erasure seem to be the 'end of tenements' narrative that is told?