Quentin's Weeknotes 8/17/19-8/23/19

This Week:

• I went back to work at the Yager Museum after three weeks away. So much to do, including

  • getting ready for Hartwick College’s Matriculation (which happened this Wednesday),
  • setting up a new exhibit entitled “Art / Politics: Power, Persuasion, and Propaganda” which I curated
  • preparing to teach MUST250: Collectors and Collecting in a week.
  • getting the fall Museum events schedule up and running, including our welcome back reception, The Horror in the Museum, and much more.

• I finished reading Dave Neiwart’s “Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump”. It was good, and quite thorough in its charting of the intertwining trajectories of the patriot and neo-confederate movements. But it held little beyond description, and Neiwart’s prescriptions in the afterward struck me as short-sighted.

• I read this wonderful historical article about W.E.B. Du Bois debating a White Supremacist author in 1912. It’s a riveting read, as Du Bois made a literal laughing-stock of this guy, but also for what it says about contemporary “debates” with White supremacists and other sundry ethno-nationalists. As someone (who I can’t find right now) on twitter noted, commenting on this article, Du Bois shut these arguments down 100 years ago so we shouldn’t have to listen to them today!