Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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It is not hard to imagine Washington recognizing the subversive potential offered by Arts and Crafts thinking, even if he did not openly discuss it in his writing. (As far as I know, Washington never commented on Ruskin or other Arts and Crafts’ theorists, though apparently Ruskin was on the reading list for Tuskegee students.) Arts and Crafts proponents, and most particularly William Morris and his followers, saw the movement as offering an alternative social and economic order, one based on a “new industrialism” that focused not on machine production but on the work of craftsmen, who represented the redeeming values of labor, education, and craft, three attributes always touted by Washington. Eric Gill, a British artist and a leading Arts and Crafts proponent, observes in his autobiography that in his commitment to the Arts and Crafts Movement he had sought to create an alternative order, “a cell of good living in the chaos of our world” that would go far “towards re-integrating bed and board, the small farm and the workshop, the home and the school, earth and heaven” (299). Likewise, Washington saw Tuskegee as a safe space for black youth where a similar type of reintegration could take place. Over the long term, Washington hoped that one sort of reintegration would lead to another and broader one: that of blacks within southern society.