American Character Research Articles

‘A woman so curiously fear-free and venturesome’: Eleanor Franklin Egan reporting the Great Russian Famine, 1922

ABSTRACTRecent scholarship on the post-First World War period has drawn attention to conservative women who often objected to being called feminists, yet whose motivations and achievements must be accounted for in an inclusive history of women’s international activism. This paper examines the work of Saturday Evening Post correspondent Eleanor Franklin Egan, whose coverage of the Great Russian Famine in 1922 helped construct a self-assuring nationalist discourse based on anti-Bolshevism and American character and values, but which elided gender, class and ethnic differences and anxieties. Egan is compared to other women journalists whose work exists at the nexus of personal, national and transnational identities.

The First U.S. History Textbooks: Constructing and Disseminating the American Tale in the Nineteenth Century

First U. S. History Textbooks: Constructing and Disseminating American Tale in Nineteenth Century Barry Joyce. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015.Does there exist a tribal creation myth of United States? First U.S. History Textbooks explores how what has been taught in history classrooms has created a metanarrative of history of US, comparing it to creation myths crafted throughout time: narrative.. .explains our origins, migrations and makeup. It can be considered a tribal myth that celebrates our triumphs and accomplishments, reconciles our defeats and rationalizes our shortcomings (4). Interestingly, Joyce not just examines role of various myths in US history and debunks them but also explores what these myths imply about US character and impact debunking has on national Zeitgeist-unique to this work.The first four chapters explore the context for emergence of American History (11) and possible origins of American textbook (12). Chapter 1, A People's Story, details how history textbooks were vestiges of ultimately unsuccessful systems of instruction, such as Lancasterian and Pestalozzian methods (26). Chapter 2, The Text is Teacher, explores how texts came to inform pedagogy in emerging, and rapidly growing, early Republic. Chapter 3, Mnemonics, Methods, and Memory, shows how history texts deviated from norms of time by focusing on storytelling instead of on popular techniques of mental development such as mnemonics and mind training (64). Chapter 4, An American Character, details how historians came to be certified storytellers (103) and relationship between history and legend.Chapters 5 through 7 are the heart of book (12), exploring both how textbook narrative provides key cultural elements around which can coalesce (12) as well as very different reality not portrayed by narrative. Chapter 5, Genesis: Emergence and Migrations, uses (inaccurate) myths of Columbus, John Smith, and Pocahontas to demonstrate shift from Old World to New World. Chapter 6, Apologetics: Why We Are Who We Are, problematizes both stories told and those who tell them. Chapter 7, Slaying Monster, shows how American Revolution narrative came to become dichotomized as a story of right and wrong, good versus evil (184).The book's remainder explores how controversial is consensus narrative that explained our origins as a people (14). …

Making Photography Matter: A Viewer's History from the Civil War to the Great Depression

Photographic historians emphasize the importance of the production, circulation, and reception of photographs. However, as Cara A. Finnegan notes, there are very few studies that examine the ways photographs were viewed historically. Visual studies scholars discuss what “we” see in an image, but this “we” is more often the historian than the historical viewer (p. 6). Finnegan's study ably addresses this problem by analyzing the “rhetorical traces of viewers' encounters with particular photographs” at four key historical moments, arguing that these viewers' engagement with photography helped them negotiate “emergent anxieties and crises of U.S. public life” (pp. 7, 1). In the first chapter, Finnegan links Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and James Gibson's battlefield images of Civil War casualties with William H. Mumler's studio portraits of departed spirits, showing how viewers of these images “acknowledged the capacity of photography to produce presence in the face of profound, and often permanent, absence” (p. 2). The second chapter explores how, when a newly discovered photograph of the young Abraham Lincoln was published in 1895 during a time of expanding concerns about U.S. national identity, cultural elites employed popular discourses of phrenology and physiognomy to emphasize how the photograph demonstrated Lincoln's distinctively American character. The third chapter takes a different approach, focusing not on the viewers' reception of photographs, but on a relatively unknown photographer, Thomas R. Dawley, as a kind of viewer who activated “photography's capacity for appropriation” (p. 3). In 1912 Dawley published The Child That Toileth Not to argue in favor of child labor, combining his own photographs with reinterpretations of Lewis Hine's anti–child labor photographs. Finally, Finnegan argues that viewers who left comments in response to a 1938 Farm Security Administration (fsa) photographic exhibition negotiated the “magnitude” of the Great Depression by emphasizing the realness of the photographs, deploying popular descriptions of poverty, supporting expanded government intervention and proposing broader distribution of the fsa photographs.

American character: a history of the epic struggle between individual liberty and the common good

American character: a history of the epic struggle between individual liberty and the common good

Place, Space, and Time in MC Solaar’s American Francophone

Place, Space, and Time in MC Solaar’s American Francophone

The first U. S. history textbooks: constructing and disseminating the American tale in the nineteenth century

Chapter 1: A People's Story Chapter 2: The Text is the Teacher Chapter 3: Mnemonics, Methods, and Memory: Organizing and Encoding the American Story Chapter 4: An American Character Chapter 5: Genesis: Emergence and Migrations Chapter 6: Apologetics: Why we are who we are Chapter 7: Slaying the Monster Chapter 8: The Narrative Divides Chapter 9: The Narrative Re-joined Conclusion: Who Will Write This Story?

Is Quentin Tarantino Calvin Candie?: The Essence of Exploitation in Django Unchained

This essay argues that Quentin Tarantino’s use of African American cultural history as a cinematic tool is similar in exploitation to the actions of his own slave-owning villain Calvin Candie in Django Unchained. Through the close examination of two key scenes, it will be shown that Tarantino’s stylistic use of slavery and African American characters is deeply problematic in its white savior arrogance to revise black cultural history through the cultural production of a film. Tarantino’s postmodern pastiche exploits signifiers from many areas of popular culture for entertainment, but it is his use of slavery, hip-hop, and representations of black masculinity as tools for audience manipulation that are particularly troubling. Tarantino’s cultural appropriation is an inherently derogatory creative choice that warrants examination by film scholars.

The Virtual Threat Effect: A Test of Competing Explanations for the Effects of Racial Stereotyping in Video Games on Players' Cognitions.

Past research provides evidence that embodying a racially stereotyped African American video game character triggers stereotyped thinking among White players. However, the mechanisms through which virtual racial embodiment of a negatively stereotyped character in a video game impacts stereotyped thinking are still unknown. This study expands on past research and utilizes a between-subjects experimental design to test two possible theoretical explanations: the virtual threat effect and presence. On the one hand, embodying a negatively stereotyped African American character may elicit stereotyped thinking among White players due to the mere exposure to the threatening stereotype. According to this explanation, negative affective response to the threatening stimulus predicts stereotyping. On the other hand, the process of embodying, not just observing, the stereotyped African American character suggests that presence in the game may determine how impactful the game imagery is on White players' stereotyping of African Americans. In this case, level of presence would predict stereotyping. The findings of this study advance research by providing evidence of a psychological explanation for the negative effects of embodying a racially stereotyped video game character on players' race-related perceptions. We conceptualize the "virtual threat effect," which may be applied in additional contexts to understand how embodying stereotyped representations of outgroups in virtual environments may negatively affect individuals' perceptions and support of these groups.

Speaking Black, 1824: Charles Mathews’s Trip to America Revisited

Actor and comedian Charles Mathews sought information and inspiration to portray African American characters previously unrepresented on the London stage. During his visit in 1822-23 to major cities in the northeastern United States he encountered ‘literary blackface’, nonsensical dialogue that ridiculed the intelligence and citizenship rights of African Americans. He transcribed two stanzas from the most recent ‘bobalition’ broadside. Although he did not include these ‘scraps of songs and malaprops’ directly into his Trip performance, they formed part of his informal rehearsals on tour, and his cultural memory: ‘literary blackface’ influenced the style, rather than the content, of his London show. His friend, the actor and singer Thomas Philipps, whom he met again in New York, arranged the song ‘Possum up a gum tree’. David Claypoole Johnston, who performed on stage with Mathews in Philadelphia in early 1823, produced four prints of Mathews and also parodied African American speech in his illustrations.

F.J. Turner’s ‘frontier thesis’

American society was transformed by the expansion of capital Westward and the explosion in opportunities for land-grabbing and agricultural and industrial investment. F.J. Turner’s ([1893] 1961) frontier thesis portrays this transformation as the fulfilment of American character. The tensions between character and personality are examined following the ideas of Carl Schmitt on the significance of ‘the occasion’ in acquiring competitive advantage. Schmitt indicated the significance of a ‘vertical’ frontier in challenging social conventions and this constitutes a counterpoint to the ‘horizontal’ frontier developed in the frontier thesis of Turner. The importance of the occasion and personality in developing the American way of life is presented by an examination of the vaudeville and celebrity traditions in American entertainment.

Eugene O'Neill: Le Génie Illégitime de Broadway

Eugene O'Neill: Le Génie Illégitime de Broadway

An American Adventure: The United States Vincentians in Jiangxi Before 1949

In the years between their arrival in Jiangxi province in 1923 and the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the “American Vincentians” (members of the Western U.S. Province of the Congregation of the Mission) proceeded with their mission work operating on the premise that the Republican government of the time held authority over a society transitioning from an imperial past towards a modernity modeled on Western example and more conducive to further extension of Catholicism into China. They lived in a liminal space, under the shadow of a revolution they could not yet envision and whose revolutionaries they could not countenance. Interwar China presented the missionaries with significant challenges, from the impediments to conversion presented by local marriage culture to the impact of the Japanese invasion of the Chinese mainland. The arrival of the American Vincentians had signaled a transition from a European to an American character in Catholic mission work in China; the Vincentians were unable to significantly resolve the contradictions between their goals and Chinese conditions in the face of a coming revolution that completely overturned the post-imperial republican order.

Indians in the Margins: Teaching the Native American Characters in John Rollin Ridge's <em>Joaquin Murieta</em>

Indians in the Margins: Teaching the Native American Characters in John Rollin Ridge's <em>Joaquin Murieta</em>

Revolution Is a Fiction: The Way We Read (Early American Literature) Now

Literary criticism may be nearing most significant dispositional shift since advent of New Historicism some thirty years ago. What Paul Ricoeur called the hermeneutics of suspicion and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick named paranoid reading--interpretive modes that view texts and especially their aesthetic dimensions as covers for abstract and dispersed ideological systems hidden below or behind, methodology I'll join Bruno Latour in calling simply critique--find their fundamental assumptions challenged by theorists sometimes lumped together as postcritique. (1) The desire of literary critics to change what Rita Felski calls mood can be measured by academic traction of various early-stage analyses of--to refer to title of an issue of Representations that helped spur such discussions--the way we read now. Moving forward, those investigations will take different forms in different literary fields, just as New Historicism did. I am concerned here with how such approaches to going postcritique might animate early American literary studies, field that, for reasons I'll explore below, has thus far remained largely impervious to such discussions. In order to jump-start these examinations of our field imaginary, we need first to recognize that critique, in early American literary studies, takes two forms, not one, although both are ultimately rooted in same axiomatic insistence that literature must be understood in relation to broader, more stable, prior, and prioritized locale of meaning (ideology in one, history in other). In addition to suspicious reading, which finds an abstract and hidden systematic agent that literary text either reveals or obfuscates (or both), early American literary studies remains dominated by faith in facts--a fact faith--that constitutes text's historical meaning. Both versions not only locate text's meaning someplace other than in text (what Heather Love and others have criticized as postulations of textual depth), they also deny critic's hand in generating that depth and ideals (or threats thereof) discovered there. The critic's purported disinterest (which I want to redefine here not as an honesty to one's object of study but as disloyalty to one's own imaginative idealism) is maintained through accusations of presentism or biased projection that police borders between objective and subjective criticism (the latter always under suspicious scrutiny). Hand in hand with critical objectivity comes deep skepticism about speculative idealism, and nostalgic faith that literature's meanings lay in recoverable past, not in present or future whose possibilities rely on imaginative hopefulness of critic. These assumptions, I believe, have kept early American literary studies from contributing to substantial methodological (as opposed to content) innovation, especially those centered on imaginative aesthetics of literature and ethical positions it might enable in present. Of critique as suspicious reading--what I'll designate hard critique--the field has no shortage. Let me take representative case study from pages of Early American Literature. An essay about Robert Finley, who was instrumental in founding American Colonization Society to transport freed slaves to African colony of Liberia, starts by observing that Finley began his career as schoolteacher who developed pedagogical strategies adaptable to larger social audiences, and concludes: By advocating expulsion of blacks characterized as lazy, docile, primitive, and violent, society helped make ambition, civilization, and sensibility seem natural and exclusive property of whites and hence of identity. (2) That society came into existence soon after ratification of Constitution, when political leaders struggled to define uniquely American character, suggests, author asserts, central role racial differentiation played in framing of national belonging and in generating a race of Americans in sense of both common public constituency and naturalized group character linked to body. …

Is Quentin Tarantino Calvin Candie?: The Essence of Exploitation in <em>Django Unchained</em>

This essay argues that Quentin Tarantino’s use of African American cultural history as a cinematic tool is similar in exploitation to the actions of his own slave-owning villain Calvin Candie in Django Unchained . Through the close examination of two key scenes, it will be shown that Tarantino’s stylistic use of slavery and African American characters is deeply problematic in its white savior arrogance to revise black cultural history through the cultural production of a film. Tarantino’s postmodern pastiche exploits signifiers from many areas of popular culture for entertainment, but it is his use of slavery, hip-hop, and representations of black masculinity as tools for audience manipulation that are particularly troubling. Tarantino’s cultural appropriation is an inherently derogatory creative choice that warrants examination by film scholars.

Native Encounters: Examining Primitivism in Hemingway and London’s Short Fiction

Native EncountersExamining Primitivism in Hemingway and London’s Short Fiction Gina M. Rossetti (bio) For two of the more preeminent twentieth-century American authors, Hemingway and London share an interest in examining the limits of primitivism, particularly as they come to delineate the impact of race privilege. In Hemingway’s stories, for instance, we see two distinct evocations of the primitive: on the one hand, in “Indian Camp,” “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” and “Ten Indians,” we witness white, western culture impose itself on the Native American community, revealing a paternalism that marks these encounters; on the other hand, “Big Two-Hearted River” suggests the psychological impact of this privilege where Nick believes that a primitive setting might restore his peace of mind. In these examples, the more privileged character assumes that the primitive setting or character acts as a foil meant to reflect back to him an image of his own greatness. What these stories suggest, however, is that the opposite happens: it is by these very depictions that Hemingway challenges this frame of reference. For London’s “Keesh, the Son of Keesh,” “Law of Life,” “The League of the Old Men,” and “Nam-Bok the Unveracious,” the encounter between the Caucasian character or Caucasian expansionism into Native American lands is one that leaves readers with images of death. For these particular stories, the so-called primitive characters represent either those who have embraced assimilationism, which has placed them in tension with their tribal communities, or these characters come to symbolize the end of their tribal nations, suggestive that no place exists for them in modern society. By examining these selected texts, one might understand how Hemingway and London call attention to the erasure of a people and a way of life and offer shared critiques of white privilege. [End Page 55] Primitive Implications: London Over the span of his body of work, London’s focus on primitivism is both extensive and complicated. At times, he uses primitivism to distinguish between a more privileged Anglo-American identity versus those some might label as “low-born” characters, whether these characters are ethnic/racial minorities or the urban poor. At other times, London’s primitivism suggests a time known as pre-civilization, depicting different kinds of so-called noble savages, such as what we find in his 1906 novel Before Adam, or even perhaps in his depiction of Native Americans or pacific islanders. What is important to note, however, is that London’s depiction of Native American characters is far more sympathetic, and as Jeanne Reesman notes in Jack London’s Racial Lives, London “saw the terrible results of greed for gold and the effects of white expansion upon the Indians” (58). Reesman indicates that London’s journal from his Yukon River trip reveals that the author “wrote of his admiration and pity for the Natives he encounters, many of them with barely enough to eat or shelter to warm them, suffering in large part because of the changes white invasions caused” (60).1 This sense that time has run out for indigenous populations is apparent in London’s short story “The Law of Life.” In this story, Nature is the arbiter, judging whether or not a species survives. As a result, London establishes Nature’s law as supreme, suggesting that “She had no concern for that concrete thing called the individual. Her interest lay in the species, the race” (16). Here, London problematizes nature’s so-called objectivity; by erasing not only Old Koskoosh, but also his tribal nation, the Law furthers the interests of white expansionism: the tribe of Koskoosh was very old. The old men he had known when a boy, had known old men before them. Therefore it was true that the tribe lived, that it stood for the obedience of all of its members, way down into the forgotten past, whose very resting-places were unremembered. They did not count; they were episodes. (367)2 Old Koskoosh’s death is a microcosm of the tribe’s inevitable erasure; indeed, for the former leader and the tribe itself, the wolf is literally at the door in the closing scene: Why should he cling to...

“Being Uncle Remus”: The Folk Uncanny and the Remus/Rabbit Archetype in Faulkner’s “Was” and The Reivers

“Being Uncle Remus”:The Folk Uncanny and the Remus/Rabbit Archetype in Faulkner’s “Was” and The Reivers Chad Jewett (bio) Beginning with Go Down, Moses (1942) and ending with his final novel, The Reivers (1962), William Faulkner’s final two decades of writing consistently focused on questions of black humanity and racial discord in his Yoknapatawpha County. While the literal voicing of narrative is left in the hands of white characters like Cass Edmonds in “Was” and Lucius Priest in The Reivers, the role of expressing the New South’s racial turbulence is left to black characters like Tomey’s Turl and Ned McCaslin. Like Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit in Joel Chandler Harris’s plantation stories, to which both Turl and Ned share a similarity, both of significance and depiction, these characters offer counter-narratives of disruption and expressions of black striving and resistance. As this article will show, Faulkner’s ironic use of the Uncle Remus/Brer Rabbit archetype serves as the forum for these physical “narrations,” which come in the form of a disturbing uncanny within the folk-nostalgia milieu of Cass and Lucius’s reminiscences. Both tales are narrated by a version of the white youth that makes up Remus’s audience, only to reveal the reality of the African American presence as the driver of these narratives, just as Remus’s narration of the self-asserting Brer Rabbit becomes a sleight-of-hand reflection of Remus’s own precarious freedom. [End Page 370] Like the young audience of Uncle Remus, these oblivious, white storytellers miss the assertion of autonomy coded into the Brer Rabbit-like actions of the black men they narrate, only sensing the dissonance between their attempts at golden memory and the interruptions of racial discord signified by the black characters in their stories. Like Brer Rabbit in the Remus tales, smuggling questions of black self-expression into minstrel folk stories, Faulkner plants interrogations of white ignorance and black travail in his own versions of “folk uncanny.” I use the phrase “folk uncanny” to define the moments in which expression of black struggle and strife arise in the otherwise nostalgic and (allegedly) humorous narrative of the folk tale or legend that is The Reivers and “Was.” Freud defines the “uncanny” as “something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed,” a submerged memory or idea that nevertheless resurfaces (148).1 Thus in the context of Faulkner’s nostalgic narrators, the “un-canny” becomes the moments in which a sort of “unpleasant aftertaste” surrounds attempted white revisions of black action, from drama to comedy. The uncanny is the uncomfortable repression and familiarity that we see in Cass’s and Lucius’s attempts at folk memory, which are attempts at removing racial pain from a sepia-toned, remembered South, but that nonetheless show moments of surprising struggle on the part of their black characters. While the Southern folk tale, of which the Remus stories are prime examples, establishes expectations for surprise and defiance of expectation and its own set of uncanny moments (talking animals, violent ends followed by later resurrections), Faulkner uses these generic conventions to surprise the reader with differently “uncanny” moments of racial strife. As Remus’ Brer Rabbit finds his way into conflicts that allow him to make a case for his own autonomy (and for Remus to make a case for black autonomy), so too do the actions of Ned and Turl, which are narrated as moments of laughter and surprise by the willfully nostalgic Lucius and Cass, allow for expressions of black independence and effort. Ned’s and Turl’s actions become narrations that replace the actual narration of Remus.2 David W. Robinson and Caren J. Town interrogate similar questions of expression and signifying blackness in their article “‘Who Dealt These Cards’: The Excluded Narrators of Go Down, Moses.” They frame the significance of the African American characters of the novel as a kind of [End Page 371] “narration,” in which “narration is understood here to denote not just verbal articulation, but also nonverbal, nonmimetic shaping of the text … Faulkner’s excluded narrators may not always come to voice, but they...

Uncanny Compulsions: Automatism, Trauma, and Memory in Of One Blood

Uncanny CompulsionsAutomatism, Trauma, and Memory in Of One Blood Joshua Lam (bio) Correction: Due to a technical glitch, a few italicized titles in "Uncanny Compulsions" by Joshua Lam dropped out. P 487, 2d to last time: Of One Blood P 490, n. 20, line 1: Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor P. 491, n. 28, line 5: Bodies in Dissent P. 492, Works Cited: Young, Elizabeth, should be followed by her book Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor The Press and Callaloo regret the error. The online versions of this article have been corrected. Click here to download the orginal PDF as it was printed. In recent years, critics have begun to frame slavery in the United States in terms of haunting and trauma studies, directing us to consider the ways in which texts such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) “disturb our sense of historical time” (Tuhkanen 335). Yet as Mikko Tuhkanen suggests in his analysis of temporality in Hagar’s Daughter (1901–1902), Pauline Hopkins may well have been one of the first African American novelists to situate slavery in terms of trauma’s ghostly presence. Indeed, Hopkins’s turn-of-the-century fictions are filled with references to spirits and specters, and are overwhelmingly concerned with the continued effects of slavery on the post-slavery nation. Scholars have been especially attentive to the prevalence of racial passing in Hopkins’s narratives, focusing on the ways in which her novels expose the imbrication of slavery and miscegenation in order to combat the ideology of racial purity.1 Yet few scholars have discussed the connection between Hopkins’s ghostly depictions of slavery and the discourse of hysteria in French psychiatry and American psychology, especially evident in her novel Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self (1902–1903).2 This is perhaps because the novel is singular in its use of hysterical illness, historically the provenance of European and Anglo-American white women, to frame the traumas propagated by the legacy of slavery upon black bodies.3 Indeed, while feminist critiques of the discourse of hysteria are now well known, scholars have been less attentive to the ways in which this discourse intersects with turn-of-the-century racial ideologies. Yet as Of One Blood demonstrates, the nascent discourse of hysteria, with its genesis in nineteenth-century mesmerism and spiritualism, provides an uncanny lens through which the complex legacies of slavery, miscegenation, and historical trauma can be witnessed. Drawing upon the vast network of associations linking hysterical “automatism” to double consciousness, automatic writing, and hypnosis, Of One Blood evokes a variety of discourses—psychological, psychical, spiritualistic, historical, romantic, occult—to interrogate the trauma and historical violence perpetrated against black bodies and psyches. The novel focuses upon two African American characters, Reuel Briggs and Dianthe Lusk, who both pass as white and suffer from different hysterical illnesses: Reuel from a neurasthenic melancholy, and Dianthe from “nervous shock” and what Reuel (a doctor) calls “a dual mesmeric trance” (Hopkins, Of One Blood 472). More than merely adopting a medical discourse that primarily applied to Anglo-Americans, however, the novel uses “automatism” to represent conflicted acts of ambiguous agency and volition. Throughout the novel, Reuel and Dianthe are shocked, silenced, moved, mesmerized, and manipulated by others—cast as living automatons. Indeed, Hopkins’s novel presents a decisive understanding of the ways in which automatism—hysterical, mesmeric, or traumatic—signals [End Page 473] suspended agency, and Of One Blood is inseparable from the connections between these discourses and the legacy of racial violence in the United States. Hopkins’s endeavor hinges upon its incompletion, however, for Of One Blood equally participates in a project of racial uplift in which individual will is subordinated to the will of a God who has made us “all of one blood.” Adopting popular pan-African themes in what Kevin Gaines identifies as a key strategy of racial uplift ideology, Hopkins “sought to make civilization a racially inclusive, universal concept by calling attention to its origins in African society” (111).4 In this context, the hysterical illnesses of black characters might even indicate a gesture of inclusion (e.g., non-whites, too, are susceptible...

Translating blackness in Spanish dubbing

One of the most frequent English social dialects that we can hear in American cinema is the so-called Black English or Ebonics, whose users are typically (although not exclusively any more) African American characters. In this study, we attempted an approach to the linguistic portrayal of black characters on screen and the translation of these ‘black-speech’ traits into Spanish by closely examining both the original and dubbed versions of a total sample of 19 films belonging to the genre of Afro-American cinema. We hypothesized that, even when the general tendency would most likely be neutralization, the resulting target text might still be characterized by ethnically marked discourse, having a distinctive and recognizable identity. We believe that the data obtained needs to be complemented with further research in order to accurately prove our hypothesis; however, we could conclude that the target version contains some specific elements that may provide the audience with the necessary clues that would lead them to associate this ethnically marked dubbed discourse with black ethnicity.

The Anglo-American Connection: Examining the Intersection of Nationality with Class, Gender, and Race in the James Bond Films

James Bond/007 is a popular cultural icon of British identity. Working as a secret agent for the British organization MI6, Bond travels the world on missions and acts in the best interest of his country to safeguard its geopolitical interests.1 While he can and does harbor doubts about these missions, he is nonetheless depicted as a loyal agent serving Queen and Country, as Domino Derval remarks in Thunderhall (Terence Young 1965). Although Bond operates as a solo agent and is not assigned a regular 00 partner, he often works opportunistically with those he encounters in the field, and more routinely with other non-British agents, collaborating frequently with American allies. These relationships, both opportunistic and planned, are crucial to mission success and have been seen by many scholars and fans as indicative of the changing contours of the post-1945 geopolitical world, and the Anglo-American relationship.In the Eon/United Artists Bond films, these American characters usually work for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and represent American geopolitical interests, such as furthering regional hegemony in strategic spaces such as the Arctic, the Caribbean, East Asia, and even outer space. According to the historian Jeremy Black and author of the Politics of James Bond, support for the United States [was] central to British policy during the cold war [and] is important to Bond's in the films (Black 94). The depiction of Bond working with American allies not only helps to connect the common geopolitical interests of Britain with America vis-a-vis the challenges posed by China, Russia, and nonstate entities such as SPECTRE, but it also serves as a way to attract American filmgoers to the films (Bennett and Woollacott 29). Even the choice to cast Sean Connery over David Niven for the role of Bond in Dr. No (Terence Young 1962) was judged a commercial necessity. Producer Albert R. Broccoli felt that Niven was too English for the part and envisioned for Bond a more midAtlantic image with a tougher persona that would appeal to both British and American audiences.2 Not only did the films rely on the United States as a primary market, but the films themselves were strongly shaped by American creative personnel like Broccoli and screenwriter Richard Maibaum. Without United Artists underwriting the earliest Bond films, the franchise would never have developed in the manner that it did.3This article considers the representation and geopolitical significance of Bond's American allies to better understand how Anglo-American geopolitical interests are refracted across the different eras of the franchise. The intersection of nationality with class, gender, and race shapes the reading of American characters and informs the nature of their relationships with Bond. A number of recurring characters and character types appear across the franchise including Felix Leiter, a variety of American Bond Girls, and a handful of minor figures like J.W. Pepper and Jack Wade. But those intersections, however important, are not sufficient in their own right. Bond's repeated demonstration of what he can do, touch, and feel also matters to the relationship. His ability to connect is what makes the relationship special with his American allies-he can push the button at the right moment, seduce a key informant, and sense danger that others cannot. So while Bond may be the junior partner operating in a Cold War geopolitical climate dominated by the United States, it is his personal intuition, touch, and movement that allows him to connect with people, objects and sites/spaces, and thus emerge as a dominant/superior figure.The Connery Era ( 1962-67, 1971): Establishing the AngloAmerican ConnectionThe Anglo-American connection was established in the Connery era through the pairing of Bond with a male CIA operative. Felix Leiter is the best-known American ally of Bond and a close friend who appears in ten films across the franchise. …