Cultivating Critical Self-Reflection in an International Context: The Development of an American Studies Curriculum in Turkey

This essay discusses the recent efforts to redefine the discursive strategies and critical objectives of American Studies in the context of Lawrence Grossberg's very critical re-assessment of the triumphal success of British Studies in the U. S. during the 1990s. The New Americanists have reclaimed the historical and political dimensions of American (Culture) Studies, opened the perspective to postnational narratives, and placed their work in the wider context of American imperialism and a globalizing world. The essay points out, however, that the various attempts at internationalizing American Studies tend to be built on a unidirectional perspective that is in danger of constructing and re-appropriating the articulations of intracultural as well as of interor cross-cultural differences. As an alternative, it suggest a more radical version of dialogical cultural critique in/of American Studies that draws on the dialectics of border discourses in American multicultural critique and projects a new dialogics of International American Culture Studies, of the encounter of American and foreign scholars in a bior multidirectional joint venture, as well as briefly indicating some crucial case studies. American Studies and British Studies In the late 1960s, American Studies was in a deep crisis. It was declared intellectually bankrupt, politically reactionary, a handmaiden of American imperialism during the Cold War era, and a failure in its effort to offer an interdisciplinary understanding of American culture as a whole, past and present. ТЪе various redefinitions that were given during the 1970s and early 1980s usually replaced key terms or critical approaches that had characterized the field by their opposites without seriously reconceptualizing the formative principles and objectives of American Studies in a rapidly changing cultural and theoretical context. American Studies as an integrative study of American culture fell apart and was replaced by a sequence of politically engendered and committed interdisciplinary programs such as Black Studies, Women's Studies, Urban Studies, Popular Culture Studies, Native-American Studies, Chicano/a Studies, Asian-American Studies, Queer Studies, etc. that, however, often seemed to have to face methodological and institutional problems similar to those of the American Studies programs they rejected. Anyway, American Studies did not seem to work any longer anywhere near the frontiers of contemporary scholarship. Thus, it did not come as a surprise that when British Studies was widely discovered during the second half of the 1980s, and the famous Cultural Studies Now and in the Future conference at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1990 provided the defining moment for a triumphal success of Studies in the United States during the 1990s, it was received as another wave of traveling theory from Europe. Studies from the Birmingham Centre seemed to offer new anThis content downloaded from 157.55.39.35 on Wed, 31 Aug 2016 05:07:12 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Rethinking the Center from the Margins K. Scott Wong (bio) Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. By Gary Y. Okihiro. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994. 203 pages. $25.00 (cloth). $12.95 (paper). Since the 1968–1969 Third World Strike at Francisco State College and University of California-Berkeley, when Asian American studies emerged as part of the political/educational agenda of Ethnic studies, the field has attained a fair degree of respectability and maturity. 1 A number of universities and colleges now offer courses in Asian American studies, a variety of English department courses often include Asian American literature, and most recently, the University of California, Santa Barbara has established the nation’s first Asian American studies department. In addition, the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) has grown into a nationally recognized academic association with an annual meeting, and the AAAS regularly sponsors a panel at the yearly American Studies Association conference. The maturity of the field, in terms of published scholarly work, was exemplified with the publication of Ronald Takaki’s Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (1989) and Sucheng Chan’s Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (1991). These two survey texts of Asian American history marked the point at which enough research had already been published to warrant and sustain the writing of two synthetic, yet interpretive, studies of the histories of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and South and Southeast Asian Americans. Utilizing primary and secondary sources, these two scholars summed up a whole generation of Asian American historical studies and thus provided the field with standards by which future synthetic historical work in the field will be measured. With [End Page 415] the publication of Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture, Asian American studies has been advanced again by Gary Okihiro’s adept blending of history, literature, sociology, and cultural studies, all of which come together to provide a provocative and insightful reading of the Asian American experience and how it fits into the larger themes of American history, Ethnic studies, American studies, and contemporary debates on what it means to be an “American.” This book is made up of six chapters, each originally presented as lectures (printed here with slight modification) at Amherst College in the spring of 1992 during Okihiro’s tenure there as the John J. McCloy ‘16 Professor of American Institutions and International Relations (Okihiro is an associate professor of history and director of the Asian American studies program at Cornell University). As he mentions in the preface, these lectures were written and presented during a time of cultural debates. During this period, there was a “fervent and oftentimes heated debate about the idea of a mainstream, about the core of American history and culture, about intellectual ‘ghettoization’ and ethnic ‘balkanization’“ (ix). Thus with debates of this nature in the background, these lectures take up the issues of where and when Asian Americans enter and become part of the larger American cultural and historical landscape. There is also a bittersweet irony that these lectures were commissioned by the John J. McCloy Distinguished Visiting Professorship. During the Second World War, McCloy served as the Assistant Secretary of War (and later as the High Commissioner to Germany and the president of the World Bank) and was a staunch supporter of the wartime internment of Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans. Okihiro, one of the foremost historians of Japanese America, must have relished the opportunity to deliver these lectures under the auspices of McCloy’s legacy. 2 A general theme that reappears throughout these lectures is the contention that the core values and ideals of the nation emanate not from the mainstream but from the margins—from among Asian and African Americans, Latinos and American Indians, women, and gays and lesbians. In their struggles for equality, these groups have helped preserve and advance the principles and ideals of democracy and have thereby made America a freer place for all. (ix) Viewing American history in this way requires a recentering of our perspectives. Herein lies the book’s main contribution to the currrent discourse about race and ethnicity, gender studies, American studies, and [End Page...

In writing about American studies in Greece, one is tempted to consider for a moment the fact that the field, ever since it placed itself on the international academic map, has been in a constant process of self-discovery and self-becoming. Its openness, which may be taken as evidence for its vibrant existence and its ability to reconstruct and deconstruct itself, has led to new areas of research, new formulations, new critiques, as well as to an essential paradox : although we currently witness an increasing interest in American studies, as evidenced by the steadily growing number of American studies organizations all over the world, there seems to be no fixed definition of what American studies is or represents. In the context of the new global conditions, a number of scholars have argued that American studies should develop "new paradigms for thinking about the United States, through the shared critical dialogue of national and international perspectives." 1 Shelley Fisher Fishkin, in her Presidential Address at the American Studies Association (Nov. 12, 2004), pointed out the transnational turn in American studies, while Benjamin Lee, as early as 1995, spoke of the need for a "critical internationalism," a continuous de-centering of "our preconceptions both of ourselves and of others." 2 In view of this turn towards the transnational, Heinz Ickstadt reminds us that "the study of American culture can have a national focus and a transnational perspective, since cultural identities are the result of complex cultural exchanges embedded in histories that extend beyond national borders." 3 2 With these in mind, and given the present de-centralized status of the field, one could argue that American studies can take various forms and have different faces all over the world, depending on diverse national interests, traditions, political and historical experiences. In Greece, the trajectory of American literature and culture seems to have been inextricably linked to the various political and ideological transformations that took place in mid-20 th century. It was just a few years after the end of World War II, and with the implementation of the Marshall Plan in 1947, when American literature and American culture in general started making their presence felt in the Greek market. And with them, the American myth of equal opportunity for all, prosperity and progress began to penetrate the national consciousness of Greeks who were (Re)Considering American Studies in Greece

The Ashcan School paintings discussed in Douglas Tallack’s Urban Visual Culture course at the University of Nottingham were, for me, the hook. I was enthralled by the way that my growing knowledge of the history of chaotic, cosmopolitan, early-twentieth-century New York opened up the complex legibility of these works. Coming to American studies after having previously read English and philosophy, I was surprised to be spending my time looking at art. However, while researching my thesis (“On the Cusp: Stephen Crane, George Bellows and Modernism”), as a Terra summer residency fellow, and in my postdoctoral career, I have sought to catch up on both art history practice and the history of American art. I now teach in the School of American and Canadian Studies at Nottingham, where I offer courses entitled The Emergence of Mass Culture and American Realisms. My journey, from novice to teacher—or novice teacher—in less than a decade represents a fairly intense encounter with American art. But it also suggests a trajectory, from initial fascination to a more informed engagement, relevant to encounters of other kinds. At Nottingham, visual art forms one element of our interdisciplinary Thought and Culture survey and is also taught in specialist options, such as those named above and Celeste-Marie Bernier’s course African American Visual Culture. Both approaches are used at other U.K. American studies undergraduate programs: at the University of Leicester, painting and photography are discussed in courses exploring the City and the West; at King’s College London, Shamoon Zamir leads secondand final-year options titled Visual Culture: An Introduction and Photography USA; and at the University of Winchester, Carol Smith asks the students who take her Picturing a Nation course to reflect on the discourse surrounding recent exhibitions of American art in Europe. At these and other programs, American art is explored in an interdisciplinary American studies framework, with all the attendant benefits and dangers. American art also appears in U.K. university curricula within art history programs. Typically offered as options for secondand final-year students who have already taken the introduction to Western art, these courses tend to be specific in period or thematic focus. While the emphasis is often post-1945, as in the New York School course at the University of Leeds, Michael Hatt examines an earlier moment in Modern American Art, 1900–1930 at the University of Warwick, and Andrew Hemingway teaches Inventing the Americans: Issues in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture at University College London. While sharing the common difficulty of teaching the subject at some distance from its objects and archives, art history and American studies programs in Britain provide distinct disciplinary frames for American art. In the opening sessions of my Realisms module, I have to combine discussion of Thomas Eakins’s career with a crash course in how to read a painting, but when we come to social realism I can rely on existing knowledge of the Depression and the New Deal. Teaching students with strong foundations in methodology and with the background provided by the course The Traditions and Institutions of Western Art, Michael Hatt includes novels and cultural histories on his reading lists to provide context of earlytwentieth-century America. Both situations demand that teachers think closely about what American art requires. As yet, U.K. academics have not concluded that encounters with American art need to be framed by an American art survey. A trawl through teaching syllabuses reveals no evidence of such a course being taught. Anecdotally, at least, this approach appears to work. Students find ways of discussing the images they are shown in class, and in the courses I teach and moderate, I have read outstanding essays on racial stereotypes in early-twentieth-century advertising imagery, Edward Hopper’s sense of space and place, and historical references

American studies in Korea has emerged as an area of study out of a set of contradictions: the desire to study the English language and to train U.S. specialists who will be players in international business and relations, yet in the context of an ambivalent interest in and suspicion about American culture.1 American studies is a relatively new academic discipline in Korea; most of the programs have begun within the last ten years. American studies in Korea can be roughly categorized as follows: academic departments that offer bachelor's degrees in American studies; undergraduate programs with American studies as a "cross-disciplinary major/minor" (usually in schools without an American studies department); graduate schools of international/area studies that grant master's degrees in an American studies specialization; university-affiliated American studies/North American studies institutes; and international/ area studies institutes with American studies sections.2 There may be several reasons for the low visibility of American studies in Korea. First of all, among university faculty in Korea, there generally tends to be suspicion of a field composed of different disciplines, particularly at the undergraduate level: it is not regarded as a serious and specialized "academic" major and study, but as merely an eclectic combination of concentrations. Second, with existing American studies departments in Korea devoting a substantial part of their curriculum to language training, such as is characteristic of language institutes, the raison-d'être of American studies in the university can be brought into question. Administrators and faculty who have actually sought to establish an American studies department reveal that, in fact, it is precisely for the emphasis on language and its multidisciplinary nature that their efforts are met with resistance from other departments.3 Prospective university students may be drawn to American studies for the language training and social sciences. Third, constituting a department with a faculty of various disciplines may not be so simple. Many scholars would prefer to be in traditional disciplinary arrangements as their primary affiliation, viewing an interdisciplinary department as a shift in emphasis and focus from a specialized, [End Page 439] distinguishable field (such as American literature) to a larger, less defined "America." Being in American studies would mean, for instance, fewer challenging upper-level courses to teach and fewer students who would pursue further study in American literature. Finally, institutionalizing "American" studies in Korea is bound to invite concern and criticism. For faculty as well as students, to be in "American" studies may require some justification or explanation, because of U.S. involvement in the Korean peninsula and its continuing military presence in other parts of the world. Yet, the scarce presence, the relatively brief history, and the uneven distribution of American studies as departments and programs in Korean universities do not indicate that there is little interest in it. The study of various aspects of U.S. society and culture is being conducted in international/area studies programs and individual departments in the humanities and the social sciences. Moreover, at a forum on teaching American studies hosted by the American Studies Association of Korea (ASAK) in 2003, quite a few in the audience commented that their schools were considering developing American studies as a cross-disciplinary major and concentration, without having American studies as a department.4 And many participants shared that they were faced with the task of teaching courses on "American culture" in literature departments. One or another aspect of American studies is increasingly being incorporated in Korean universities, but notably, without privileging and legitimizing it as the organizational unit in the university, a highly selective space that enjoys a special position in Korea. The very difficulty of validating American studies as an academic department is suggestive of its challenges in Korea, a nation characterized by a complicated mixture of identification with and dissociation from, as well as admiration for and resentment toward, the United States. Its history and formation will reveal that American studies in Korea is inseparable...

SOME RECENT PUBLICATIONS RELATING TO NORWEGIAN-AMERICAN HISTORY, XVI COMPILED BY CLARENCE A. CLAUSEN "A. C. M." Luren sangforening er 90 âr. Nordmanns-jorbundet, 51:111 (May, 1958). The Norwegian-American choir, Luren, of Decorah, Iowa, celebrates its ninetieth anniversary. Ahlstrom, Sydney E. The Lutheran Church and American Culture. Lutheran Quarterly , 9:321-342 (November, 1957). American Economic Association. Papers and Proceedings of the Seventieth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association , Philadelphia, December 28-30, 1957 (. American Economic Review , vol. 48, no. 2 - May, 1958). The first thirty-four pages are devoted to the Vehlen Centenary Round Table, with the following papers: Source and Impact of Veblen, by Joseph Dorfman; The Influence of Veblen on Mid-Century Insti tutionalism, by Allan G. Grundy; Veblen's Critique of the American Economy, by Paul M. Sweezy; Discussion, by Peter N. Vukasin and George W. Zinke. Ander, Fritiof. The Cultural Heritage of the Swedish Emigrant Rock Island, Illinois, 1956. 191 p. This volume contains a selected but comprehensive bibliography of books and articles relating to all aspects of Swedish immigration. Andersen, Arlow William. Norwegian-Danish Methodism on the Pacific Coast. N orwegian- American Studies and Records , 19:89-115 (1956). Apsler, Alfred. "Little Norway" on the Columbia River. American-Scandinavian Review , 44:63-68 (Spring, 1956). An account of a Norwegian settlement on Puget Island in the Columbia River. Arneberg, John G. From Mountains to Prairies. Minneapolis, 1958. 215 p. The autobiography of a Norwegian-American doctor. Balchen, Bernt. Come North with Me: An Autobiography. New York, 1958. 318 p. The autobiography of the famous Norwegian-American aviator and explorer . This book was published in Norwegian under the title Kom nord med meg (Oslo, 1958). 213 214 CLARENCE A. CLAUSEN Bergmann, Leola Nelson. A Century of Immigration. Palimpsest , 37:129-133 (March, 1956). 1956). 155 (March, 1956). Bjork, Kenneth 0. "Snowshoe" Thompson: Fact and Legend. N orwegian- American Studies and Records , 19:62-88 (1956). Pacific Coast, 18h7-1893. Northfield, 1958. xvi, 671 p. Reviewed in Mississippi Valley Historical Review , 45:505 (December, 1958). Blegen, Theodore C. Amerikabrev. Oslo, 1958. xii, 408 p. This volume of selections from hundreds of America letters was published in English under the title Land of Their Choice : The Immigrants Write Home (Minneapolis, 1955). The Norwegian edition has a foreword by Ingrid Semmingsen . Reviewed in Nordmanns-forbundett November, 1958. Studies and Records , 19:1-14 (1956). Boewe, Charles. R0lvaag's America: An Immigrant Novelist 's Views. Western Humanities Review , 11:3-12 (Winter, 1957). B0HN, Tora. A Quest for Norwegian Folk Art in America. Norwegian -American Studies and Records , 19 : 116-141 (1956). Bronner, Hedin. Norge in Virginia. American-Scandinavian Review , 45:258-263 (Autumn, 1957). The story of a Norwegian settlement in Virginia. Britain? Norseman , 15:372-374 (November-December, 1957). United States. Scandinavian Studies , 28:99-108 (August, 1956). tions of Learning in the United States. Scandinavian Studies , 30:157-177 (November, 1958). Clancy, C.S. The Saga of Leif Ericsson. New York, 1956. 223 p. A fictionalized biography of the saga hero. SOME RECENT PUBLICATIONS 215 Clausen, Clarence A. Some Recent Publications Relating to Norwegian-American History. Norwegian- American Studies and Records , 19 : 189-198 (1956). vatten. Norwegian- American Studies and Records , 19:142159 (1956). Dahl, Oddvar. Han har satt sitt preg pa Chicago. Nordmanns forbundet , 51 :90 (April, 1958). A sketch of the Norwegian-American architect, Sigurd E. Naess of Chicago. Davis, R. B. American Studies in Norway. American-Scandinavian Review, 44:348-353 (Winter, 1956). Dickerson, Inga Hansen. Trina . New York, 1956. 204 p. The story of a Danish couple who came to the United States in 1872 and experienced the hardships of immigrant life in New York and Chicago and on the plains of Dakota Territory. Dithmer-Vanberg, Eva. Knut Rockne fra Voss. Nordmannsforbundet , 50:283-286 (December, 1957). An article about the famous football coach. fornia. Nordmanns-forbundet , 51:40 (February, 1958). A Norwegian artist in California. Djupedal, Reidar. Vinje og Amerka. Syn og segn , vol. 64, nos. 9-10, p. 427-438 (1958). A discussion of the Norwegian poet Vinje's plans to go to America. Dorfman, Joseph. Source and Impact of Veblen. American Economic Review , 48 : 1-10...

Introduction: This Is America

Wars and social conflicts often serve as defining moments of history. More particularly, American history is largely established in a national narrative centered on revolutions and civil rights movements. However, equally important as those big events—in their own ways—are the ways that Americans understood and negotiated such conflicts throughout their national history. And one underexamined way that Americans have engaged with their culture is through humor. Humor is key to the in-depth reflections on the demonstration of American character in Winifred Morgan's The Trickster Figure in American Literature and John Beckman's American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt. Many oft-ignored factors of American identity are explored through these authors’ engagements with texts and demographics focusing on humor. The two studies alternate grand narratives of American culture featuring tricksters, borderland inhabitants, and paradoxes of rebellious belonging.John Beckman has created a nuanced definition of American fun as he examines joyous happenings involving risk, participation, rebellion (sometimes implicitly, other times explicitly), and democracy. Furthermore, fun is distinct from entertainment because the former unites Americans through enactments of liberty, freedom, and participation in politically meaningful acts, whereas the latter separates the public based upon gender, class, and ethnicity. Beckman is concerned with how Americans have fun and what fun has meant and still means. He examines fun from American independence to contemporary social circles. While he reflects on a variety of ways Americans have had fun (attending pubs, singing and playing music, attending festivals, attractions, and sideshows), his most salient threads trace dance and hoaxes or pranks as acts of rebellion. Beckman's work, balancing narrative and analysis, is a pleasure to read. He occasionally provides commentary and quips; he is most definitely not an unbiased historian or cultural analyst of American history. Rather, his amusement in presenting America's fun history is apparent.Chapter 1 launches with the quintessential moment of American fun: Thomas Morton's Merry Mount opposing William Bradford's Puritan rules and community. Beckman refers repeatedly to Merry Mount in justifying the continued presence of the “essence” of fun in and through rebellion. He explains fun happening in and through political events in chapters 1 through 4: Merry Mount; Jack Tars, John and Samuel Adams, and events during the American Revolution; Pinkster celebrations, African American trickster tales, and dances originating in religious African American settings evolving into Congo Square dance events; and the development of American character in the West through hoaxes, dances, and the democratic policy allowing all to have fun so long as none have their own right to fun impinged. He then shifts to P. T. Barnum, sports and dancing, and the commercialization of fun. Beckman establishes how fun was often a politically meaningful act even when it was commercialized. After reflecting on capitalist endeavors, Beckman recognizes jazz (as music and dance) as the culmination of the past types of fun and describes it as the “American spirit or a warning of civilization's decline” (164). He discusses major figures and analyzes the risks and rewards involved with jazz, which aided in the rise of the New Negro and the New Woman. This section focuses on how specific celebrities and demographics became more politically focused in their fun as the Jazz Era faded and the Harlem Renaissance arose.Beckman next examines the passivity of cinema as he begins engaging with contemporary cultural conditions. Cinema and film, he claims, are representations of a popular culture that was invented, not by the media, but by the people as they were having fun—by going to dances, playing with gender and American social norms, and pushing against temperance and strict Christian morality. The Merry Pranksters, the Beat generation, Rock 'n' Roll, the San Francisco Mime Troop, and the Diggers are all positioned as pranksters, hoax inducers, or tricksters of some sort. They engaged with and required participation from audiences. They also pushed against capitalist and, in some ways, bigoted patriotism. The Yippies, which developed in part from the Hippies and other groups just mentioned, are framed as forces of fun and rebellion. This section is valuable in its analysis of the Yippies’ court proceedings and the fun they had with the American legal system. Examining history's somewhat recursive nature, the earlier section on the Gilded Age connects with how culture created by the people was claimed and used in marketing in the 1970s as well. Commercialization, which simultaneously gives the masses what they want while giving them space to rebel, then serves as the framework for the Punk and the Do-It-Yourself mindset of America's contemporary culture. Beckman closes by considering how the active history of resistance clashes with the passive lifestyle Americans often have today. He gestures toward the need to ensure that risk, participation, and fun do not die at the expense of passivity, spectatorship, and entertainment.Whereas Beckman provides readers with a historical narrative of American humor and fun as democratic, participatory, and risky, Morgan analyzes how literary tricksters represent the need for multicultural American demographics to veil their desire for Beckman's type of fun, even as they seek to develop and engage with it as Americans. Her tone is much more formal and intended to represent her objectivity. In general, she tends to twist humor and tricksters in ways that can wring the humor out of them and present them as iconic figureheads who are not necessarily funny or witty.Morgan is concerned with the evolution and differentiation of tricksters across various multicultural American communities. She works to define different tricksters and explain how they are connected as well as different. Furthermore, she explains how trickster figures appear in nontraditional ways in multicultural texts and what type of work those trickster characters perform, both as representatives of different demographics and as critics of American social circumstances. Morgan assumes a highly analytical, formal tone in addressing her works, contexts, and audience. Her approach positions her as an authority on both tricksters and their function in multicultural literature and communities. The texts examined in Winifred Morgan's work engage tricksters who are more complex characters than their pranking ancestor stereotypes.Morgan is concerned with who American tricksters are, where they appear, and what social and literary functions they serve. To provide a fuller examination of the many versions of tricksters in American literature, Morgan analyzes tricksters in African American, Native American, European American, Chinese American, and Latino American traditions. The connecting factor of all these tricksters is that they require being “cloaked” in humor in order to make their social critiques (12). Furthermore, these characters explore race, gender, class, and ethnicity without reinforcing those boundaries. All of her chapters are formatted to discuss why she has chosen a particular cultural heritage, what its traditional tricksters look like and function as, and each chapter closes with what contemporary manifestations of kindred tricksters do. The tricksters Morgan examines are literary figures that attempt to find unity within a diverse American culture. They function as representative figures of minority American groups by combining various ethnicities with Anglo-American characteristics. Humor, pranks, or wit are not necessarily traits embodied by the tricksters she examines. Instead, the characters use humor to manipulate social circumstances—sometimes for the trickster and his or her community, other times for majority American culture. Ultimately, tricksters are agents in American culture(s) who change themselves and others through humor.Morgan studies how American tricksters live in cultural borders and reveal social contradictions while finding ways to unite Americans with their critiques. In her chapter “African Americans and an Enduring Tradition,” Morgan examines tricksters manifesting in less recognizable ways in pieces such as Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada (1976), Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982), and Toni Morrison's Tar Baby (1981). While many of the figures engage humor, sometimes in unique ways, Morgan emphasizes how they reveal social contradictions or seek threads connecting disparate American communities. Her tricksters are more than funny; often they are working to slyly draw attention to social conditions. Morgan's analysis of Native American tricksters in texts by Leslie Marman Silko and Louise Erdrich (among others) discusses how tricksters may not be concerned with being particularly witty or funny. They may be so, but sometimes only by happenstance; Morgan's selected tricksters are subversive and focused on a new version of nationality. The characters and stories she draws on do not call out communities or alienate America's multicultural communities while emphasizing social problems and contradictions (one of the most important qualities of a trickster Morgan would argue). Instead, they seek to create an equal and diverse American community. Tricksters must serve as motivators of change for themselves and others, a characteristic that takes precedence when she discusses Euro American tricksters, particularly the Merry Pranksters and John Irving's A Son of the Circus (1994).After explaining that she will limit her focus in Asian American studies to Chinese American traditions because an entire book could be written discussing the vast number of Asian American trickster traditions, Morgan analyzes these tricksters as particularly ambivalent characters—asserting traditional identities as well as exploring American elements of identities. She looks toward well-known works such as Eat a Bowl of Tea (1969) and M. Butterfly (1988) as well as Crossings (1968) and Tripmaster Monkey (1989) and highlights their characters as tricksters because they manipulate themselves and their environments. Her final section reflects on Latino American tricksters, their commentary on machismo (which at times supports, at others refutes it), and the repeated use of imagination (reminiscent of magical realism) in such works to change environments (occasionally other characters). She closes by connecting the work that all of these tricksters do to emphasize how minority communities are made Others in American literature. Her trickster analyses critique an American history that neglects narratives showing diversity, national unity, and humor. In addition, they reflect on American democracy and display social contradictions in order to promote a vision of social evolution.Both works contribute significantly to the fields of American and humor studies by addressing how humor has traditionally shaped representations and enactments of culture in the United States. Beckman's work illuminates areas that deserve attention and study as cultural motivators while Morgan's analyses explore nuances and push past traditional definitions of tricksters and trickster texts in America. Beckman focuses on how humor has been a motivator and often-ignored factor of historical and culturally defining moments, whereas Morgan reflects on how humor reveals beneficial and detrimental cultural elements. Overall, both sources would be a valued addition to either an American studies or humor scholar's bookshelf.

"Disability and the Academic Job Market" examines ableist structures in academia that inherently create obstacles to full-time employment for people with a disability. Based on historical and contemporary scholarship, it has been shown how disclosure of a disability can have profound repercussions for a scholar with a disability. Scholars with a disability are often inhibited from applying to or being promoted in academia because of direct discrimination, negative perception towards people with a disability, inaccessible physical and performance conditions, and social models of disability that characterize disability as unproductive, abnormal, and risky. While scholarship has addressed ableism in academia, it has not strongly focused on the specific difficulties and barriers that a person with a disability faces when applying for a full-time academic position. This book seeks to provide a resource that brings to light ableist conditions in the academic hiring process through the lived experiences of scholars with a disability, with hope to implement change in these situations. This collection presents a combination of personal narrative and scholarship from academics with a disability who have navigated the academic job market, with additional contributions from non-disabled allies who have advocated for change in academic structures. Our collection begins by expressing the concerned experiences of students entering the academic job market, followed by scholars who have more fully lived through the obstacles of the academic market in both contingent and tenure track positions. A vital focus of this collection is on intersectionality as chapters draw from interactions between disability and race, gender, and sexuality across international contexts. Important topics discussed throughout the collection include systemic ableism, disclosure, the job interview, academic workaholism, and lack of accommodations.

Hog Ties: Pigs, Manure, and Mortality in American Culture. By Richard Horwitz. New York: St. Martin's Press. 1998. 312 pages. $27.95. Richard Horwitz's book weighs in with a wealth of pig lore, science, and first-hand experience, as well as a method for examining the stuff of which American studies is made. Not accidentally, and with self-conscious humor, Horwitz regularly reminds the reader of the connections and disconnections between agricultural and academic work. "Shit happens," as one chapter title reminds us, in both places. How it happens and what it means in American studies is another matter; it is a fertile pile indeed waiting to be turned, and Horwitz has handed us the fork. Horwitz is primarily an ethnographer for whom responsible work begins with real participant-observation. In this case, he is actually working on a hog farm, but he never loses sight of his other role as academic. He takes wry advantage of the opportunity to compare one arena with the other, a gesture that significantly sets the tone for the entire book. Horwitz approached the task of cleaning a farrowing house, for example, as a "break from the sweeter-smelling but too-familiar shit at the university" (15). The farm work Horwitz contributed to his neighbors' operation--which provided a set of original questions for the book--was rewardingly real in a way that academic work could not be; moving between them could be disorienting. The "shift from [End Page 592] shit-covered floors to ivied walls and from hired hand to professor" could take painfully ironic turns, as when a plumbing emergency on the farm might, as he notes, "affect my ability to finish rereading a book that students had to discuss that afternoon. Since the book was about rural life in America, I was in the odd position of trying to limit my experience with the subject so that I could teach it better. That irony and the press of the moment were too extreme to be amusing" (121). If excremental connections between academia and a hog house are perhaps predictable, others are more telling, about hogs and universities to be sure, but about Horwitz's approach as well. Regarding his disinclination to see vertically integrated, corporate producers of pork as "the bad guys" in driving small pork producers out of the business and despoiling rural neighborhoods with large scale hog confinement systems, he writes: "my own university is itself an analogue--a vertically integrated student confinement system--but I would like to think it has redeeming value, much of it precisely because it is big" (66). Mingled with Horwitz's sometimes acerbic commentary on academic work and life is a genuine interest in the world of pork producers. He is curious about the daily routine of hog farming and the ideas informing swine science, and he describes them in great detail. He is proud of his hands-on accomplishments, reminding readers humbly that his abilities might match those of an early adolescent farm kid; he is eager to engage his neighbors/employers/informants in conversation about the meaning of their work and carefully reports and interprets their occasional reluctance to do so. The hogs themselves--as livestock, edible pork, and cultural symbols--suggest avenues of inquiry to follow away from the particular farm Horwitz himself knows. Big questions of the significance of agriculture in American culture, the controversy surrounding vertical integration of agricultural industries, the meaning of disease in American science and culture, and the ways in which Americans resist looking at and understanding mortality as part of life, spin away from the hog lot in waves of investigation that enlist but also challenge Horwitz's skill as a reader of material objects (like hogs, but also pig tchotchkes), as an interpreter of popular and scientific writing, and his work with informants. His allusions to Moby-Dick at the beginning of the book, including a catalogue of desultory porcine material like the one Melville's sub-sub librarian provides, are not entirely misplaced. Hog Ties...

There is a reflexive relationship between the image of the city and its ruination in American literature and culture. The city orders the way in which we conceive of the democratic experience, and its ruin exposes the problems inherent in that urban order. Far from being set up as an oppositional pair, the concept of “cities and ruins” instigates a semantic dance of interrelated meanings that informs our civic participation and our modes of passing into the future. This essay reviews three texts, recently published, that explore the renewed emphasis in American studies on the role of the city in literature and culture and the processes of its ruin: The City in American Literature and Culture, edited by Kevin McNamara, Miles Orvell’s Empire of Ruins: American Culture, Photography, and the Spectacle of Destruction, and Andrew F. Wood’s A Rhetoric of Ruins: Exploring Landscapes of Abandoned Modernity.

Taking stock of recent trends in American studies, Watson uses Malcolm Lowry's neglected novel Lunar Caustic (1968) as an entry point into an exploration of the implications for readers and teachers of movements in American studies in a transnational direction. He argues that Lowry's novel can be read as a precursor and allegory of current attempts to position American studies and culture within a transnational and cosmopolitan network: Lowry re-imagines and re-interprets American literature and popular culture without centralizing and naturalizing their relationship with the cultural and national imaginaries of the American nation-state. Instead, American culture is depicted as a component of a transnational system, which constitutes and determines America as much as it, in turn, is modulated by the globalization of American culture. Lowry's novel maps and foregrounds this transnational terrain, constituted by a series of reciprocal movements between the local and the global, and challenges thereby a pedagogy grounded in the area studies model of literary scholarship.

Reflections on the Latino/a experience with regard to both US hegemonic and Latin American cultures engage in theoretical considerations of great relevance to the study of inter-American relations. These books approach the subject from two different perspectives. Critical Latin American and Latino Studies, an essay collection edited by Juan Poblete, analyzes the current situation of Latino and Latin American studies in the US and the overall significance of the growing connections between the two fields. Debra Castillo’s monograph, Redreaming America: Toward a Bilingual American Culture, examines literary works written in Spanish, English, and Spanglish, by authors situated between Latin America and the United States, who write about the conflicts created by contact between the two cultures. Both books reflect on the meaning of assuming a transnational perspective when definitions of national paradigms are such an important part of the discussion. While Poblete’s collection provides an overview of the debates in this area, with essays by well-known scholars, Castillo’s book studies narratives and stereotypes, in order to address the exchange of languages, behaviors, traditions and peoples that takes place in the United States with regard to Latin America. In his introduction to Critical Latin American and Latino Studies, Poblete discusses the separation between Latino and Latin American Comparative American Studies

Reviewed by: Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era by Brian Russell Roberts Z. Hall Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era. By Brian Russell Roberts. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 2013. “The ambassadorial tradition in African American writing has remained uninterrogated in relation to one of the New Negro era’s major arenas of political culture. This political culture operated on the planetary scale of official internationalism, and it became co-constitutive with the cultural politics of New Negro artistic ambassadorship” (14). American studies, and African American and black diasporan literature and culture scholar Brian Roberts probes U.S. international diplomacy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to illuminate the “strong and weak, formal and informal, connections between official internationalism and African American culture” (10). His work “offers critical access to previously unrecognized black internationalists tradition produced as African American and U.S. imperial cultures have met and shaped one another” (8). Roberts arranges dialogues among the fields of anti-imperialist critique, African American literary studies, and studies in black transnationalism to demonstrate how the literary and diplomatic performances of African American writers functioned rhetorically to, at some moments, undercut [End Page 216] U.S. diplomatic intentions yet, at other moments, operated as a means of promoting the imperial sway of the United States. Arranged in three parts, Artistic Ambassadors outlines the interlocking dimensions of race, aesthetic, and international representation, and “outlines the ways in which black work in diplomacy played previously unsuspected roles in shaping major African American representational concerns, including the capacity of New Negro race men to speak for the nation’s black masses, the methods of race representation under dispute in the Booker T. Washington/W. E. B. Du Bois debate, and the signifying status of women and the black diaspora within domestic and international African American cultures” (6). Roberts examines the aesthetic and political representations of famous figures such as Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, and others and brings them into dialogue with the work of lesser-known black official and unofficial writer-diplomats of the New Negro era. Part one articulated the struggles faced by luminaries such as Frederick Douglass and lesser known African American diplomats in creating a narrative for the New Negro to supplant the myth of the Old Negro—ranging from Jim Crow to Zip Coon, Rastus to Sambo, Uncle Tom to Aunt Jemima—created by white Americans. Part two described a politics of immanence in which race becomes incidental to New Negro internationalism. Insider status becomes paramount though performances of immanence were inevitably imperfect and incomplete. Part three examined the “integration of hip knowingness of black vernacular culture into official diplomacy’s traditionally staid approach to internationalism” (118). It would have been informative if this work examined how the antecedent rhetoric of the Old Negro contained in U.S. cultural exports, predating and contemporary with the deployment of African American diplomats, weighed on the effectiveness of the representatives. Robert’s debut book is a challenging and enlightening interrogation of the international and literary projects of New Negro era figures. In addition to African American and American Studies scholars, this text is of interest to political science and international studies scholars, and literary critics. Z. Hall Independent Scholar, Kansas City, Missouri Copyright © 2014 Mid-America American Studies Association

Reviewed by: The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival by Paul Conrad Kiara M. Vigil (bio) The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival paul conrad University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021 366 pp. Paul Conrad's ambitious and powerful work The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival offers historians and Native American and Indigenous Studies scholars in-depth discussions and analyses of "apacheness"—the various identities through which Native people, while living in diasporic relation to their Indigenous homelands, both defined themselves and contended with the ways they were being defined by [End Page 616] the colonial states of Mexico and the United States. As the title notes, this is a sweeping work covering four hundred years of history in order to highlight pre- as well as post-conquest experiences of Apache life in regard to captivity, mobility, and colonization. The chronological range of this work enables Conrad to contend with both Spanish and Euro-American efforts at colonization and the shifting geopolitical and cultural spaces of the USMexico borderlands. Although this work is clearly for historians of Native America and Indigenous Studies, its geographical reach will also make it of interest to scholars working in Latin American history and LatinX Studies. Given Conrad's ability to focus on the life stories and experiences of specific individuals and groups, the book will be of great interest to scholars working in American literature, as will his adept use of diaspora as both a theoretical framing device and lived-experience. Centering "diaspora" in these ways enables Conrad to add new dimensions to Native American and Indigenous Studies approaches and will also interest scholars from African American Studies, literary studies, and American Studies. Similarly, by focusing on experiences of Apache peoples in terms of mobility and also enslavement and other experiences of life in exile, there are ample opportunities for scholars working at the intersection of Afro-Native Studies to consult Conrad's work for Indigenous-centered responses to these ways of being and knowing in the world that might further enhance that growing field. Conrad's book opens with a specific example built around the story of Sam Kenoi, who had been taken prisoner by the United States at the age of eleven, when he was sent to attend the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania in 1898, a critical moment for many of his Apache kin who were experiencing life as prisoners of war, living in exile in Florida, Alabama, and later Oklahoma after being taken from their homes in Arizona. Kenoi's life in exile, his first time being exposed to the conditions of diaspora, was full of "tragedy and triumph," Conrad notes, as the settler state promised him a better life through the attainment of industrial skills and an education that would assimilate him into American culture and society, even if he had to leave all traces of his Native identity behind (1). As many scholars of Native history have pointed out, this period of assimilation and allotment marks the end of violent resistance by Native people to settler colonialism. In many ways it also represents a period of growth in the colonial state's infrastructure and reach, as the Indian Office (which would [End Page 617] later become the Bureau of Indian Affairs) created new ways to confine and limit the power of its Indigenous wards. Mobility, then—for all Native people, including those the state called "Apache"—became a new site of resistance and survival. Kenoi's particular story, Conrad asserts, points us to a broader portrait of Apache life and death across North America and the Caribbean. "As Kenoi knew so well, the history of colonialism for Native people was one of pain and loss, slavery and dispossession, but it was also a history of resistance, adaptation, and return. These fantastic and terrible stories are Apache history, Native history, all of our histories" (13). Drawing on the poetry of Joy Harjo, Conrad reminds readers of the core themes of American Indian history: "rootedness and displacement, pain and laughter, a seemingly impossible but true survival" (2). Conrad uses these themes to expand on the example of Kenoi's life, arguing that his...