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The Retold Histories of Clemson
The Process: Making Documentary Videos in the FYC Classroom
The Retold Histories of Clemson: Three Documentary Films
Behind the Scenes”: Access, Accessibility, & Audiences
Appendix A: Assignment Prompt for The Retold Histories of Clemson Project
The Retold Histories of Clemson
To design an occasion for students to create a short documentary film that “re-makes” the sanctioned, sanitized, “official” history of Clemson University, I designed The Retold Histories of Clemson, a public humanities project that revises and rewrites some of the histories surrounding the Clemson University campus community (see Appendix A). My students’ attempts to film plural “histories” of Clemson, including those neglected within official tellings, ventures to connect documentary filmmaking within the FYC classroom with the prospect of social change. Doing so challenges students to not only be observers of public memory and extant rhetorical ecologies, but also to be active participants in the formation of texts contributing to new ecologies. Students are challenged to be participants in the invention of revised and retold histories engaging social justice exigencies surrounding race, gender, and colonialism of Indigenous peoples. When we challenge students to become participants in the writing and re-writing of histories, we make them participants not only in multimedia initiatives, but in the global public sphere as well.
In other words, a pedagogy might be designed that is concerned with generation of new histories, rather than the rehashing of older, already-written ones. This provided my courses with an opening in which we could compose histories of Clemson University that foreground the institution’s past as a slave-owning plantation, as a site of enduring race-based discrimination toward African American community members, and as a contemporary site of history-production, many of which are sanitized, apologetic narratives pedaled by official stakeholders. Consumption is intimately connected to production in documentary filmmaking, and students collaboratively building The Retold Histories of Clemson learn to compose revisionist histories and historiographies actively and operationally through acts of documentary filmmaking. Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel’s (2012) vision for a public multimodal pedagogy, one that attempts to put creative power and multimodal production capabilities in the hands of student participants, can be extended to challenge students to engage surrounding communities in ways that are complex and multifaceted, including challenging the ways communities author local histories. This enterprise is highlighted when students are asked not simply to use filmmaking tools but to do something with them, to create their own artifacts to disclose to the world. Here, students connect multimodal composition with the possibility of social change, composing, as Gries (2019) calls it, to assemble publics (331). Here, students are not just consumers or critics of histories related to race, to slavery, and to discrimination based upon gender, race, and class, but are active participants in outlining a vision for better histories more in line with what they would like to see in the world.
Students worked in small groups to assess their take on what constitutes a worthwhile “re-telling” of the history of Clemson University. Clemson University was built on the site of a former plantation owned and run by the families of U.S. Senator John. C. Calhoun and his son-in-law Thomas Green Clemson, both vocal white supremacists and staunch defenders of slavery as an American cultural institution. The university, still bearing Clemson’s last name in its linguistic identity, rests on the foundations of the plantation built by slave and exploitive convict labor, and has since had an extremely checkered history with tacit denial and superficial half-acknowledgment of a sanitized, hollowed-out history with slavery and racial exploitation, including even tours of historical buildings on campus (O’Brien et al., 2016). Working with primary source materials assembled by Dr. Rhondda Thomas and the Call My Name project, which documents and shares stories of African Americans and their contributions to the development of the university we know today, students in these FYC courses attempt to assemble a “re-told” history of their university that is more in line with the course content and values the students had discussed throughout the semester (Thomas, 2019; Thomas, 2020). These topics include discussion related to rhetoric's role in mediating subjugation based upon race, gender, and disability, language’s implicit and explicit resonances in light of twenty-first century racism and racial violence, and Clemson University’s specific histories confronting and tacitly denying these events. Students were also allotted opportunities and resources to connect Clemson University’s early discrimination and segregation based upon race with other instances of structural oppression, specifically historical violence waged on the basis of gender, ability, class, sexual orientation, and religion, and which often center a white, straight, Christian male at the core of Clemson’s history.
The Retold Histories of Clemson constitutes an attempt to revise old histories grounded in racism, sexism, and exploitation, but also articulates an attempt to challenge our notions of what it means to articulate communal values through a documentary narrative that assembles a variety of publics and which circulates both within and outside of our local university publics.
The Retold Histories of Clemson is an attempt by a few community stakeholders (four FYC courses, about 80 individuals altogether) to author narratives that outline our vision for what our community narratives mean, what they represent to us now, and what they’ve meant for our past developments and for our community’s future. Embedded within the popular understanding of Clemson University, as elevated by mainstream media representations and public relations endeavors, is a sanitized, superficial narrative of Clemson’s history with slavery and segregation pedaled by administrations and booster groups attempting to flatten and gloss over the very real violences at the heart of the university community’s foundation. Universities across the country are reckoning with the realization that the motives of the neoliberal, corporate R1-designated university only rarely overlap with the real work that comes with acknowledging and beginning the process of partially atoning for past violence that has been purged from official, sanctioned histories.
The Retold Histories of Clemson represents one modest attempt to articulate stories and narratives that have been neglected, deferred, and undervalued by existing power structures. The Retold Histories of Clemson positions itself less as a representation of what these sorts of revisionary histories should look like or as a perfect representation or solution to any problem at all, but rather as a modest effort within the structures afforded by a FYC course to revisit what are oftentimes taken-for-granted histories, and to initiate and generate a dialogue as our documentary films circulate among a diverse coalition of public stakeholders in this issue.