Paul R. Mullins

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https://hdl.handle.net/1805/11714

Paul Mullins is a historical archaeologist who studies the intersection of materiality and the color line, focusing on the relationship between racism, consumption, and urban displacement. He is the author of Race and Affluence: An Archaeology of African America and Consumer Culture; Glazed America: A History of the Doughnut; and The Archaeology of Consumer Culture. Mullins' research has focused on urban displacement in Indianapolis, examining how a century-old, predominately African-American community was displaced and is now reconstructing its history. His scholarship has included archaeological excavations, documentary research, and oral history in Ransom Place, Flanner House Homes, the present-day IUPUI campus, and postwar African-American suburbs. The research on the history of the IUPUI campus has produced an oral history collection, The Price of Progress: IUPUI, the Color Line, and Urban Displacement, which was co-edited with community partner Glenn White. The book illuminates the legacy of urban renewal and the erasure of African-American life in the near-Westside.

During 2016-2017, Mullins, along with his Anthropology Department colleague Susan Hyatt, were named the inaugural Charles R. Bantz Chancellor’s Community Fellows. Their project, “Invisible Indianapolis: Race, Heritage and Community Memory in the Circle City,” examines the history and material culture in a series of Indianapolis neighborhoods that are currently effaced, ignored, or misrepresented in public discourse. The goal of the project is to use ethnographic interviews and documentary research to illuminate how otherwise “invisible” neighborhoods provide powerful insights into challenging the histories of the class, cultural, religious and racial inequalities that continue to shape our city.

Dr. Mullins work on the history and material culture of Indianapolis neighborhoods is another example of how IUPUI faculty are TRANSLATING RESEARCH INTO PRACTICE.

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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
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.
The Importance of Innocuous Things: Prosaic Materiality, Everyday Life, and Historical Archaeology
(2012) Mullins, Paul R.
Perhaps the boldest challenge of Historical Archaeology and the Importance of Material Things was its ambitious definition of material culture that could confront a vast range of social questions, but historical archaeologists continue to circumspectly define archaeological data, focus on the prosaic details of everyday life, and avoid anomalous goods. This paper examines the implications of a historical archaeology that answers many of the Ferguson collection’s challenges, taking aim on materiality in broad terms addressing the profound social significance of apparently mundane archaeological material culture and crafting a reflective picture of everyday life and materiality.
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.
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.
The Rhetoric of Things: Historical Archaeology and Oral History
(2013) Mullins, Paul R.
This paper examines precisely how objects assume meanings in archaeological interpretation and a dimension of everyday life and experience that exists on the fringes of self-consciousness. Archaeologists interpret the meanings of material things in ways that have often sought to erase the ambiguities of material symbolism in conventional linear narratives, but oral memories routinely struggle with the meaning of things and underscore their complex and ambiguous meanings. The paper examines how the contributors to this volume illuminate the implications of oral memories on broader material culture scholarship both within and beyond historical archaeology.
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
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.
Racializing the Commonplace Landscape: An Archaeology of Urban Renewal Along the Color Line
(2006) Mullins, Paul R.
In the 1960’s Indianapolis, Indiana’s near-Westside was transformed by urban renewal projects that carved space for the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) campus out of a predominately African-American neighborhood. Within two decades that longstanding community was totally displaced, and today the former neighborhood covering 300 acres is completely effaced and the community is largely forgotten. This paper examines how archaeology on the University campus provides a mechanism to illuminate the processes that remade the near-Westside. Archaeological research conducted along with the displaced community and its descendants provides a powerful tool to rethink the otherwise prosaic campus landscape as a space shaped by racial and class privilege.
Practicing Anthropology and the Politics of Engagement: 2010 Year in Review
(2011) Mullins, Paul R.
In 2010, a rapidly growing body of public scholars continued to conduct engaged research that involved various forms of collaboration, advocacy, and activism. Practicing anthropologists are among the most powerful champions of engaged scholarship and are increasingly focused on tracing the concrete dimensions of public engagement. Practicing anthropologists in 2010 made a concerted effort to critically assess precisely what constitutes collaboration, engagement, activism, advocacy, and a host of similarly politicized but ambiguous terms. This self-reflection has probed the philosophical, political, and methodological dimensions of engagement and painted a rich and complex picture of practicing anthropology. In this article, I review those 2010 studies that are focused on critically defining an engaged anthropology and expanding it to rigorously four-field public scholarship with conscious and reflective politics.
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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