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Papers by David Ensminger
With almost 400,000 Axis troops in internment camps throughout most American states and Canada du... more With almost 400,000 Axis troops in internment camps throughout most American states and Canada during World War II, the region hosted an influx of short-term, temporary, and forced immigrants on an unprecedented scale. Each detention site became a distinct pop-up cultural microcosm – an Italy, Germany, and Japan in exile – that featured both elite high culture activities, like symphonies and romantic drama, as well as resilient folk art practices as well. Due to overall American tolerance and generosity, in most cases, internees could revel in a sense of pride, nostalgia, and heritage. Overt Nazism was discouraged but occasionally thrived, undeterred by armed guards and razor wire, which sometimes did not even exist.
Many camp routines did reflect rigid military mores and hierarchies, both Axis and American, but work environments for rank’n’file enlisted men POWs (officers were not required to work), which took place in branch camps situated in rural communities, from rice paddies and East Texas ranches to Midwest orchards and asparagus canning factories, tended to offer more flexibility and freedom, as asserts Nick Clemenza too, a guard stationed in New Mexico “at the Bogle farm, where American soldiers would tell a prisoner needing discipline that he would have to go back to the base camp in Roswell. This worked as discipline because the prisoners preferred the freedom of the Bogle farm.”
These opportunities, which offered kinesic and proximal immersion in workaday American life, fostered amiable perspectives towards former enemies. Such newfound relationships are evidenced in the folk production of goods, from paintings and cabinetry to jewelry, models, and toys, that were handcrafted and gifted, bartered, traded, or sold to locals (the collection of Robert Henderson features a receipt for a POW handicraft valued at $6.00 in 1943, a rare paper trail of evidence), cementing long-lasting relationships and receptive attitudes towards democratic values and systems. Such aspects are chronicled in letters, visitations, and the immigration of former POWs back to America, the country of their detainment.
This is a website in progress, which can be viewed here:
https://powartinamerica.wordpress.com
For three decades, African Americans have often been depicted in the popular press and even indep... more For three decades, African Americans have often been depicted in the popular press and even independent media as embodying the living legacy of a hip hop nation, which the media often signifies as an urban, misogynist, and materialistic “street level” musical genre and lifestyle. Such representation effectively diminishes, or even negates, through absence or scant coverage, African American participation in punk and rock’n’roll. In doing so, the media perpetuates hegemonic notions of African Americans as a homogeneous community -- easily containable “others” -- without nuance and individuation. Ensminger interrogates the common misconception that punk is essentially a white (or Anglo) Do-it-Yourself participatory subculture. In contrast, he argues that the neglect of a mixed, diverse, and inclusive punk history demonstrates that African American punk cultural productions are undervalued, absent, or deleted. Such interrogation leads to what Stuart Hall has termed “making stereotypes uninhabitable” in his lecture “Representation and Media” (1997). Ensminger reclaims the roles of people of color in punk, thus undermines fixed, normalized assumptions about race in American pop culture, rendering them unstable and arbitrary. Rewriting punk music as a transhistorical, cross-cultural, and synergistic negotiation between African American and Anglo music cultures creates new potentials for meaning and a mode of empowerment for a generation previously unaware of punk’s truly democratic ethos.
This paper can be accessed here:
http://www.pomoculture.org/2013/09/03/coloring-between-the-lines-of-punk-and-hardcore-from-absence-to-black-punk-power/
Postmodern Culture, Sep 11, 2011
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: I tend to imagine store window... more In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
I tend to imagine store window displays as late-capitalism voyeur tableaux, microcosms, and dioramas, more than mere passer-by enticement. They become a pitch and pronouncement, a Weltanschauung, a way of making meaning, a fetish-world, and an inner-view. They feel layered and riddled with an unconscious and conscious psychogeography, a keyhole to paused worlds in an urban environment teeming with fuss and speed, indifference and callousness. As an invitation and lure, they act as freeze-frames of stories made anew by each gaze. Through the distancing and filtering functions such window panes perform, viewers observe carefully concocted consumption.
Sometimes the spaces act as compendiums replete with multinational goods, folk crafts still warm from kinesis and handling, or pervasive motifs of plasticized Pop. They proffer a distinct cultural specimen of each store as well as strata of economic indicators. In towns riddled with empty storefronts, the goods may seem like artifacts of duress - a few lone mustered antiques, white elephants, dime-store novelties, tchotchkes, and dust-gathering gadgets. In cities like Austin, along certain hipster-riche drags, the goods may seem both ironic and nostalgic, self-consciously retro and manicured, like a personal "museum of me" featuring inventory ready to be displayed on online sites like Etsy.
Storefronts often index cultural rituals too, from Christmas and Day of the Dead to re-enacted boyhood fantasia, bygone product eras, and Elvis worship. In doing so, the displays become self-contained simulations, orderly and sequenced, choreographed with purpose and charm, even as viewers are beset by randomness, disorder, flux, and instability in their worlds. The storefront experience is a ritual itself, meant to convey liminality. The storefront is neither the store, really, nor the sidewalk: it is in-between, unbounded. A visit to such space confers special status. Viewers are no longer totally anonymous: they are potential participants.
The windows furnish dreams; mannequins - realistic, poetically sculptural, or boldly geometric—become our surrogates. In effect, the windows complicate the participant-observer dyad. They simulate what viewers might want to be, not merely the good and products they desire. The views provide a glimpse of the fetish-object and muster scenes beyond our grasp. In turn, viewers attempt replications of their own, perhaps by hoarding the items found within the scene, splicing the store product genome with their own homes and apartments.
Like postmodern insect collectors, viewers seek specimens. As if pushing pins into the undersides of arthropods, they seek, even unconsciously, to own, display, and curate their own commodities and fetish-lined spaces, cupboards of their own curiosities, and to align items according to their own algorithms. The store window environments teem with personas and prompts, some ancillary and accidental, some pertinent to the storytelling and myth making. Some relate to the ideology of the store-as-brand and the sensibilities and gestalt of employees. The displays become a series of enmeshed ideas, not merely tracts of goods.
The displays signify group identification as well. Culled from dispersed, sundry items locked within the geometry of stores, the displays become doppelgangers of both viewers and curators and articulate desires that viewers have yet to recognize. Viewers become tacit voyeurs held in limbo by the strict frontality and fixed formula of each storefront, and each viewer attempts to discern the parts of the palette, fondly appraising the habits of Pop.
Some might define the style of my photos as aloof and amateurish. Others might deem my approach an anti-aesthetic and liken it to factory floor technical photography. Unfussy and straightforward, the style matches the pieces. The eerie stiffness of each mise-en-scene seems synonymous with leisure society's dead space, which is inhabited by mannequins, papier-mâché creatures, ceramic architecture, and stuffed animals to create frozen faux landscapes and postures of post-modernity.
Still, others might liken my approach to Pop itself: the flatness and centrally composed subjects are the modus operandi. People might assume I seek to subvert Pop and kitsch iconography with the pre-existing and inherited images filtering into the camera eye. Yet I imagine each window as a three-dimensional postcard, or a magic lantern show of consumerist chic, simultaneously awash in high culture aspirations, pop...
With almost 400,000 Axis troops in internment camps throughout most American states and Canada du... more With almost 400,000 Axis troops in internment camps throughout most American states and Canada during World War II, the region hosted an influx of short-term, temporary, and forced immigrants on an unprecedented scale. Each detention site became a distinct pop-up cultural microcosm – an Italy, Germany, and Japan in exile – that featured both elite high culture activities, like symphonies and romantic drama, as well as resilient folk art practices as well. Due to overall American tolerance and generosity, in most cases, internees could revel in a sense of pride, nostalgia, and heritage. Overt Nazism was discouraged but occasionally thrived, undeterred by armed guards and razor wire, which sometimes did not even exist.
Many camp routines did reflect rigid military mores and hierarchies, both Axis and American, but work environments for rank’n’file enlisted men POWs (officers were not required to work), which took place in branch camps situated in rural communities, from rice paddies and East Texas ranches to Midwest orchards and asparagus canning factories, tended to offer more flexibility and freedom, as asserts Nick Clemenza too, a guard stationed in New Mexico “at the Bogle farm, where American soldiers would tell a prisoner needing discipline that he would have to go back to the base camp in Roswell. This worked as discipline because the prisoners preferred the freedom of the Bogle farm.”
These opportunities, which offered kinesic and proximal immersion in workaday American life, fostered amiable perspectives towards former enemies. Such newfound relationships are evidenced in the folk production of goods, from paintings and cabinetry to jewelry, models, and toys, that were handcrafted and gifted, bartered, traded, or sold to locals (the collection of Robert Henderson features a receipt for a POW handicraft valued at $6.00 in 1943, a rare paper trail of evidence), cementing long-lasting relationships and receptive attitudes towards democratic values and systems. Such aspects are chronicled in letters, visitations, and the immigration of former POWs back to America, the country of their detainment.
This is a website in progress, which can be viewed here:
https://powartinamerica.wordpress.com
For three decades, African Americans have often been depicted in the popular press and even indep... more For three decades, African Americans have often been depicted in the popular press and even independent media as embodying the living legacy of a hip hop nation, which the media often signifies as an urban, misogynist, and materialistic “street level” musical genre and lifestyle. Such representation effectively diminishes, or even negates, through absence or scant coverage, African American participation in punk and rock’n’roll. In doing so, the media perpetuates hegemonic notions of African Americans as a homogeneous community -- easily containable “others” -- without nuance and individuation. Ensminger interrogates the common misconception that punk is essentially a white (or Anglo) Do-it-Yourself participatory subculture. In contrast, he argues that the neglect of a mixed, diverse, and inclusive punk history demonstrates that African American punk cultural productions are undervalued, absent, or deleted. Such interrogation leads to what Stuart Hall has termed “making stereotypes uninhabitable” in his lecture “Representation and Media” (1997). Ensminger reclaims the roles of people of color in punk, thus undermines fixed, normalized assumptions about race in American pop culture, rendering them unstable and arbitrary. Rewriting punk music as a transhistorical, cross-cultural, and synergistic negotiation between African American and Anglo music cultures creates new potentials for meaning and a mode of empowerment for a generation previously unaware of punk’s truly democratic ethos.
This paper can be accessed here:
http://www.pomoculture.org/2013/09/03/coloring-between-the-lines-of-punk-and-hardcore-from-absence-to-black-punk-power/
Postmodern Culture, Sep 11, 2011
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: I tend to imagine store window... more In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
I tend to imagine store window displays as late-capitalism voyeur tableaux, microcosms, and dioramas, more than mere passer-by enticement. They become a pitch and pronouncement, a Weltanschauung, a way of making meaning, a fetish-world, and an inner-view. They feel layered and riddled with an unconscious and conscious psychogeography, a keyhole to paused worlds in an urban environment teeming with fuss and speed, indifference and callousness. As an invitation and lure, they act as freeze-frames of stories made anew by each gaze. Through the distancing and filtering functions such window panes perform, viewers observe carefully concocted consumption.
Sometimes the spaces act as compendiums replete with multinational goods, folk crafts still warm from kinesis and handling, or pervasive motifs of plasticized Pop. They proffer a distinct cultural specimen of each store as well as strata of economic indicators. In towns riddled with empty storefronts, the goods may seem like artifacts of duress - a few lone mustered antiques, white elephants, dime-store novelties, tchotchkes, and dust-gathering gadgets. In cities like Austin, along certain hipster-riche drags, the goods may seem both ironic and nostalgic, self-consciously retro and manicured, like a personal "museum of me" featuring inventory ready to be displayed on online sites like Etsy.
Storefronts often index cultural rituals too, from Christmas and Day of the Dead to re-enacted boyhood fantasia, bygone product eras, and Elvis worship. In doing so, the displays become self-contained simulations, orderly and sequenced, choreographed with purpose and charm, even as viewers are beset by randomness, disorder, flux, and instability in their worlds. The storefront experience is a ritual itself, meant to convey liminality. The storefront is neither the store, really, nor the sidewalk: it is in-between, unbounded. A visit to such space confers special status. Viewers are no longer totally anonymous: they are potential participants.
The windows furnish dreams; mannequins - realistic, poetically sculptural, or boldly geometric—become our surrogates. In effect, the windows complicate the participant-observer dyad. They simulate what viewers might want to be, not merely the good and products they desire. The views provide a glimpse of the fetish-object and muster scenes beyond our grasp. In turn, viewers attempt replications of their own, perhaps by hoarding the items found within the scene, splicing the store product genome with their own homes and apartments.
Like postmodern insect collectors, viewers seek specimens. As if pushing pins into the undersides of arthropods, they seek, even unconsciously, to own, display, and curate their own commodities and fetish-lined spaces, cupboards of their own curiosities, and to align items according to their own algorithms. The store window environments teem with personas and prompts, some ancillary and accidental, some pertinent to the storytelling and myth making. Some relate to the ideology of the store-as-brand and the sensibilities and gestalt of employees. The displays become a series of enmeshed ideas, not merely tracts of goods.
The displays signify group identification as well. Culled from dispersed, sundry items locked within the geometry of stores, the displays become doppelgangers of both viewers and curators and articulate desires that viewers have yet to recognize. Viewers become tacit voyeurs held in limbo by the strict frontality and fixed formula of each storefront, and each viewer attempts to discern the parts of the palette, fondly appraising the habits of Pop.
Some might define the style of my photos as aloof and amateurish. Others might deem my approach an anti-aesthetic and liken it to factory floor technical photography. Unfussy and straightforward, the style matches the pieces. The eerie stiffness of each mise-en-scene seems synonymous with leisure society's dead space, which is inhabited by mannequins, papier-mâché creatures, ceramic architecture, and stuffed animals to create frozen faux landscapes and postures of post-modernity.
Still, others might liken my approach to Pop itself: the flatness and centrally composed subjects are the modus operandi. People might assume I seek to subvert Pop and kitsch iconography with the pre-existing and inherited images filtering into the camera eye. Yet I imagine each window as a three-dimensional postcard, or a magic lantern show of consumerist chic, simultaneously awash in high culture aspirations, pop...