Reconstruction 6.2 (Spring 2006)
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Editorial: "Essential Kentucky" / Justin Scott-Coe
<1> Several weeks ago, I accompanied my wife from our home in Southern California to Lexington, Kentucky so she could attend the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. As it happens, Lexington is the home of Reconstruction's senior Reviews Editor, Michael Benton, a native of San Diego, who just landed a tenure-track teaching gig. We met a couple of times, he introduced me to a non-Starbucks coffeehouse where I started writing this editorial, and to the local bourbon for inspiration.
<2> Of course, one Californian to another, I had to ask Michael the obvious question: what's it like to live in Kentucky? Later, driving around Lexington, I wondered what it would be like to “end up” at one of its distinguished universities through the whim of a search committee member's first impression. Thing is, I have no connection to California either, or even to Connecticut where I was born; my family moved east because my father thought it would be cool to study law in New England, and then I came to California chasing one girl, marrying another. But individual caprice is quite different from institutionalized diaspora of post-grads merely to diversify yon faculties. Some connection to community, however faint and naively quaint, is lost. Sooner or later, we all end up living essentially in our own version of Kentucky--a long way from home.
<3> If you’ve found your way to these webpages, you probably already know that Reconstruction was created to reconnect this scattering, to create an online community of scholars. Born in the shiny and hirsute heads, respectively, of Matthew Wolf-Meyer and Davin Heckman while doing time on the bleak plain of Bowling Green State University, the journal set out to create a culture studies community as free and open as the ideas expressed therein. I am honored to contribute as the journal’s new Managing Editor.
<4> The Reconstruction community explores cultural issues, themes and works from a post-structural perspective. Reconstruction’s brand of “post-structuralism” is decentered, broad in disciplinary focus, integrating discourses in an at once rabidly radical and friendly, open-minded stretch toward new ideas and readers. You find theoretical “stars”--Derrida, Deleuse, Lacan--mentioned often in these webpages, but taken apart, set at divergent angles, positioned in a context that’s necessary and new. This is clearly demonstrated in Julie Elaine Goodspeed-Chadwick’s piece in this issue, which offers an excellent introduction to Derridean thought and its application to “lived experience.”
<5> Reconstruction will also continue its attempt to challenge prevailing notions or, as we like to call them, “sacred cows.” For instance, Michael Vastola’s essay points out that poststructuralism is the academic heir of anarchic thought, and yet constantly threatens to unsettle the “academic” establishment. Likewise, Rob Cover challenges the prevailing coupledom of gay activism as an emerging conservative movement. And in a broader sense, several writers in this issue contradict the fashionable lack of serious dialogue between religiosity and scholarship.
<6> Back to Kentucky--while packing up to leave the Lexington conference on Sunday, I watched the morning political programs effortlessly segue into broadcasts of religious services on every major network's local station. My knee-jerk reactionary thought was that this was a simple demonstration of politics mixing with red-state religiosity in America's Heartland.
<7> My reflex falls in line with one of the most widely read public intellectual titles on bookshelves today, Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy (2006). Though Phillips has written some pretty solid stuff in the past on the complexities of American politics and its relationship to historical religiosity—see The Cousins' Wars (1999)—here he trades the serious study of religion implied by his title for the infamy of a Da Vinci Code-like conspiracy leading up to George W. Bush.[1] And for that Phillips is trotted out on the Jon Stewart Show.
<8> The wages of Kentucky must be more complicated than the Phillips road show--must in fact, historical pun aside, be reconstructed. Conrad William’s essay begins this work by taking another, more literary author, Salmon Rushdie, to task for his misunderstanding of classic religious inspiration in his fiction. Joseph Thomas likewise descends into the bowels of Funkadelic to find the soul moving restlessly within their shit-inspired lyrics. Finally, William Haney goes even further into offensive territory and attempts an essentialist interpretation of a self-consciously post-structuralist play, making an argument based not on run-of-the-mill Aristotelian Christianity but on Vedic consciousness theory; Haney essentially accuses post-structuralism itself of being a dogma. Theocracy? We should be so lucky.
<9> As it was said in a previous editorial, “Reconstruction is not a place for manifestos”; it is instead a place for community. We have recently become part of a larger community: Eserver, a massive space for online scholarship, offered us a deal we couldn’t refuse--namely free online server space. We will soon begin to fully exploit the possibilities of this space, including improved navigation and engagement with authors and issues. Looking forward, Reconstruction will use the tools that Eserver provides to help its expanding circle of scholars send our quirkiest, most gravitationally challenged work away from our lonely homes and into cyberia.
Endnotes
[1] Phillips had already ably covered the Bush family in American Dynasty (2004), making Theocracy a sequel and well as a cheat.[^]