Browsing by Author "Mullins, Paul R."

Now showing 1 - 10 of 26
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    Achaeologies of Race and Urban Poverty: The Politics of Slumming, Engagement, and the Color Line
    (2011) Mullins, Paul R.; Jones, Lewis C.
    For more than a century, social reformers and scholars have examined urban impoverishment and inequalities along the color line and linked “slum life” to African America. An engaged archaeology provides a powerful mechanism to assess how urban renewal and tenement reform discourses were used to reproduce color and class inequalities. Such an archaeology should illuminate how comparable ideological distortions are wielded in the contemporary world to reproduce longstanding inequalities. A 20th century neighborhood in Indianapolis, Indiana is examined to probe how various contemporary constituencies borrow from, negotiate, and refute long-established urban impoverishment and racial discourses and stake claims to diverse present-day forms of community heritage.
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    The Archaeology of Consumption
    (2011) Mullins, Paul R.
    A vast range of archaeological studies could be construed as studies of consumption, so it is perhaps surprising that relatively few archaeologists have defined their scholarly focus as consumption. This review examines how archaeology can produce a distinctive picture of consumption that remains largely unaddressed in the rich interdisciplinary consumer scholarship. Archaeological research provides concrete evidence of everyday materiality that is not available in most documentary records or ethnographic resources, thus offering an exceptionally powerful mechanism to examine complicated consumption tactics. In a broad archaeological and anthropological context, consumption studies reflect the ways consumers negotiate, accept, and resist goods-dominant meanings within rich social, global, historical, and cultural contexts.
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    Art, Race, Space
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2013-04-05) Kryder-Reid, Elizabeth; Labode, Modupe; Holzman, Laura M.; Mullins, Paul R.
    Art, Race, Space is a collaborative research project that takes as its starting point E Pluribus Unum, a public art installation proposed for the Indianapolis Culture Trail by renowned artist Fred Wilson that was cancelled in 2011 due to controversy surrounding Wilson’s appropriation of a freed slave figure from the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. Art, Race, Space” goes beyond examining the visual legacies of racial bondage to explore how the public responses to sculptures, memorials, and archaeology reveal our society’s faultlines of race and inequality. Building on the ideas about race, class, visual culture, and democratic debate that emerge from the Indianapolis project, the faculty have designed a multifaceted program to advance scholarship and promote civic dialogue about these significant issues. The faculty members organized an interdisciplinary symposium in January, 2013. Supported by an IAHI grant, the symposium explored the complicated relationships between art, race, and civic space with presentations by Wilson, community representatives who supported and opposed the sculpture, and scholars from a variety of disciplines who examined historical and cultural contexts of the controversy that had revealed Indianapolis’ longstanding racial and class tensions. The dialogue was expanded with the presentation of historical and contemporary examples from other parts of the United States. In order to encourage public dialogue, the symposium provided opportunities for audience members and presenters to engage in conversations, and it deployed social media (Twitter and Facebook) to encourage broader participation. The project's goal is to further scholarship and encourage public conversation on race and materiality. To this end the faculty have created a website, a Facebook page, Twitter account, and are working on an open-access curriculum to support dialogue in schools and informal learning settings about the complex issues of art, race, and representation. The faculty are also collaborating on academic publications, including selected proceedings and an article on the symposium's "hybrid discourse" that combined university and community resources, expertise, and communication practices and brought together diverse voices in constructive conversation about the challenging issues surrounding E Pluribus Unum.
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    The Banality of Gilding: Innocuous Materiality and Transatlantic Consumption in the Gilded Age
    (2012) Mullins, Paul R.; Jeffries, Nigel
    This paper examines Gilded Age affluence by focusing on apparently inconsequential decorative goods and assessing how such goods were part of shared transatlantic patterns that reached beyond the Gilded Age and the confines of urban America. The paper focuses on figurines recovered from 19th-century sites in London and underscores how the American Gilded Age amplified many early 19th-century material patterns and ideological practices that were well-established in the United Kingdom and continued after the height of Gilded Age affluence. This study examines the symbolism of such aesthetically eclectic goods and focuses on the socially grounded imagination that was invested in them borrowing from dominant ideologies and idiosyncratic personal experiences alike.
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    Book Review: Broken Chains and Subverted Plans: Ethnicity, Race, and Commodities
    (University of Chicago, 2018) Mullins, Paul R.; Anthropology, School of Liberal Arts
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    Consuming Lines of Difference: The Politics of Wealth and Poverty along the Color Line
    (2011) Mullins, Paul R.; Labode, Modupe; Jones, Lewis C.; Essex, Michael E.; Kruse, Alex M.; Muncy, G. Brandon
    Commentators on African American life have often focused on poverty, evaded African American wealth, and ignored the ways genteel affluence and impoverishment were constructed along turn-of-the-century color lines. Documentary research and archaeology at the Madam CJ Walker home in Indianapolis, Indiana illuminates how the continuum of wealth and poverty was defined and negotiated by one of African America’s wealthiest early 20th century entrepreneurs. The project provides an opportunity to compare the ways in which wealth was defined and experienced along the color line in the early 20th century and how such notions of Black affluence shaped racialized definitions of poverty and materiality
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    Contexts of Time and Space
    (Indiana University, 2013-01-25) Kyrder-Reid, Elizabeth; Pierce, Richard; Mullins, Paul R.; Upton, Dell
    Panel including: Elizabeth Kryder-Reid, Introduction. Richard Pierce, “We’ve Been Trying To Tell You: African-American Protest in Indianapolis.” Paul Mullins “Racializing the City: An Archaeology of Urban Renewal and Black Indianapolis.” Dell Upton, “Dual Heritages: The New Face of White Supremacy in the Old South.”
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    Excavating America's Metaphor: Race, Diaspora, and Vindictationist Archaeologies
    (2008) Mullins, Paul R.
    Over more than a century African diasporan scholars have defined identity in complex forms that aspire to resist racial essentialism yet stake consequential political claims to collective roots. Historical archaeology has painted a rich picture of the material details of African American life that also refutes black essentialism, but archaeologists have crafted many utterly fluid African diasporan identities that sometimes fail to examine the global connections, anti-racist citizen rights, and concrete cultural heritage long examined by diasporan scholars. An empirically and politically rigorous African diasporan archaeology would be significantly extended by diasporan scholarship’s vindicationist and reflective anti-racist perspectives. Such an archaeology could disrupt essentialist categories and outline concrete foundations for diasporan identity without lapsing into either particularism or hyper-constructivism.
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    The Hoosier Story - Archaeology of Race
    (Awry Productions, 2022-05-26) Mullins, Paul R.; Anne, Shaw
    IUPUI Anthropology Professor Paul Mullins sits down with The Hoosier Story host, Anne Shaw, to discuss the expansion of IUPUI's campus and the historically Black neighborhood its expansion displaced. Professor Mullins also shares his research and discusses how historical archaeology can teach us about the relationship between racism and material culture.
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    Imagining Conformity: Consumption and Homogeneity in the Postwar African American Suburbs
    (Springer, 2017-03) Mullins, Paul R.; Anthropology, School of Liberal Arts
    In the wake of World War II many urbanites left cities for a suburban life that has been persistently derided for its apparent social, material, and class homogeneity. This paper examines the African American experience of post–World War II suburbanization and the attractions of suburban life for African America. The paper examines two suburban projects in Indianapolis, Indiana, one a “sweat equity” housing community and the other a subdivision, both of which placed consumption at the heart of postwar citizenship. Rather than frame such consumption simply in terms of resistance to anti-Black racism, the two suburban experiences illuminate the African American imagination of visual and material “sameness” and demonstrate the challenges of archaeological studies of ethnicity and stylistic distinction.