American Cultural Landscape Research Articles

Perioada nord-americană

The purpose of this article is to bring to the forefront the theatrical activity carried out for eight years by Theodor-Cristian Popescu in the North American cultural landscape. Following the path of the Romanian theatre director, the article presents the performances he directed during his master’s degree at the University of Montana and also the theatrical events he staged in Montréal and Toronto, once he moved to Canada. Drawing on a variety of sources (press articles – reviews, interviews, press releases –, as well as program booklets, grant applications or evaluations of his teaching activity), the article aims to provide the Romanian public with a detailed presentation of Theodor-Cristian Popescu’s theatrical activity abroad (theatrical animator, director, teacher).

Introduction to Critical and Creative Engagements with Petro-Media

The production of oil is imbricated in financial and socio-political systems as well as ways of mediating the worlds in which we live. Like infrastructures used to transport fuel, audio-visual media and other forms of cultural production (museums, poetry, film, visual art) can serve as conduits for ideas about energy, identity, relationships to the nonhuman world, and history. This special issue of Imaginations on “Critical and Creative Engagements with Petro-Media” explores how media has been used to examine petroleum’s place within Canadian and American cultural landscapes as well as oil’s attendant socio-political and economic structures. Given our location on occupied Indigenous territories where we work as researchers and educators, we assert that energy developments are always already implicated within histories of white settlement in North America. Drawing on literary and film studies, energy humanities scholarship, critical museum studies, and a variety of creative and analytical research methods, the contributors to this issue theorize contemporary and historical practices of corporate petro-media alongside creative interventions to trace the interlacing of oil, media, and settler colonialism.

“It Must Be Preserved”: Adolph Bolm's Revival of Le Coq d'Or

“It Must Be Preserved”: Adolph Bolm's Revival of <i>Le Coq d'Or</i>

Carman Barnes’ vision of the esoteric school ‘of living’ for young Americans: The influence of Peter Ouspensky’s esoteric teaching on American cultural landscape in the second part of the twentieth century

This article seeks to investigate Carman Barnes’ initiative to create a study group for young, artistic, well-to-do women in New York City that was based on Claude Bragdon’s lectures and Peter Ouspensky’s philosophy. Although ultimately focused on spiritual health and the evolution of consciousness, Barnes included a strict fitness routine in her groups. Surveying Barnes’ unpublished archival material, her preparatory notes for the study groups and her correspondence with Bragdon and Ouspensky, the author investigates Barnes’ unique contribution to the New York cultural scene in the 1940s and the promotion of Bragdon’s and Ouspensky’s core belief in the evolution of consciousness and based it on ideas of well-being and the harmonious development of spirit and body. Furthermore, this article aims to locate the effect of Barnes’ effort to bring education in spiritual well-being to the American public.

A Critical Investigation of the Wood Frame System: The Case for the Neil Astle House

The traditional wood framed house has been a mainstay of the building industry and a dominant force on the American cultural landscape. With rare exceptions, its enormous effectiveness has seldom led to a serious questioning and challenging of what it means ‘to build’. The act of building should be a reflective act, one that recognizes repercussions and limitations. One architect whose methodology challenged the residential construction paradigms and questioned how we build is Nebraska architect Neil Astle, who reenvisioned an alternative to traditional wood frame construction in the design of his house using small wood scantling.

Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance by Amy Kaplan

Reviewed by: Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance by Amy Kaplan Miriam Eve Mora Amy Kaplan. Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 368, 19 photos. Hardcover $29.95, ebook. ISBN 9780674737624, ASIN B07DGK4FX5. Amy Kaplan's book begins by quoting a 2009 speech by Barack Obama, in which he referred to America's "unbreakable bond" with Israel, a bond that Kaplan characterizes as both unique and dangerously under examined. Our American Israel explores this bond that has long defined the relationship between the two nations, and identifies its roots in shared mythology, international threats, political ideology, military power, and righteous purpose. Kaplan focuses on popular perceptions rather than political or military history. She has managed a difficult balancing act in this endeavor, writing a history of this relationship that shows how popular media (films, novels, bestselling nonfiction, and public history) influenced historical change in American perceptions of Israel, while avoiding the pitfall of presenting media as flimsy evidence of historical change. The book's seven chapters frame a pivotal change in the American–Israeli dynamic. The first three chapters focus on efforts in the American cultural landscape to Americanize Israel, to see the fledgling state through a lens of American exceptionalism and similarity. These chapters cover the first two decades of Israeli statehood, in which a favorable American liberal consensus formed, focusing on internationalism, antifascism, and modernization. Kaplan introduces the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, an oft-neglected initiator of the relationship between the two nations, and shows how this committee and American journalists abroad played pivotal [End Page 117] roles in conceiving American support for Israel. She then devotes a chapter to Leon Uris as the creative force behind the new American perception of Israel as made in the American image (through his novel Exodus and its film adaptation). The swift Israeli victory in the Six-Day War reaffirmed the liberal consensus and helped form a paradoxical image of Israelis that Kaplan has dubbed the "invincible victim," the subject and title of her third chapter. The victory in the war also brought more of the American right into the American love affair with Israel, as it drew a stark contrast to the failures of America's simultaneous quagmire in Vietnam. The consensus was shaken, however, after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which drew tremendous criticism from the American left. Kaplan shows the tremendous impact of American journalism on the ground in Beirut during this conflict (unlike in the Six-Day War), which introduced the notion of a Palestinian homeland into American discussions of the Middle East. This event—the subject of Kaplan's fourth chapter—provides the turning point, at which the liberal consensus that Kaplan has defined is replaced by a conservative one, a backlash to liberal criticism of Israeli military power. The last three chapters flip the narrative, and focus on the Israelization of America, in which America stops projecting its values onto Israel and begins to emulate Israeli policy and strategy. In these chapters, Kaplan examines the shift in use of the Holocaust from historical justification to potential prophecy, the rise of evangelical power in the United States and its support for Israel, and the successful Israelization of American policy during the War on Terror. Though the first half of the book is more historically rigorous, the second half is innovative and exciting in its claims and connections. Kaplan introduces her readers to a number of cultural sources not traditionally associated with the relationship between America and Israel, and makes compelling arguments about their influence on current events. As the subject of the book is the perception of Israel maintained in the United States, Kaplan devotes very little time to Palestinian experiences, motives, or agency in their struggle against Israel and their own statelessness. This is understandable, given her stated subject, but still feels like an omission. Kaplan does not read as unsympathetic to the plight of Palestinians, however, making clear her dismay and horror at the Sabra and Shatila massacres, her anger at the conservative consensus that has (since 9/11) painted Palestinians as terrorist enemies aligned with Al Qaeda, and...

Colloquy: Shadow Culture Narratives: Race, Gender, and American Music Historiography

Colloquy: Shadow Culture Narratives: Race, Gender, and American Music Historiography

“Breathe in… breathe out”: Contextualizing the Rise of Mindfulness in Canadian Schools

Mindfulness practices have exploded onto the mainstream North American cultural landscape. Not surprisingly, proponents of mindfulness can also be found within education systems in North America and the western world more generally. In Canada, mindfulness-based programs have filtered into faculties of education as well as public school classrooms. Yet, despite the rapid spread of the mindfulness movement, relatively little is known about it historically. This article pieces together some of the key intellectual and cultural developments that have enabled the growth of this phenomenon: North Americans’ encounters with Buddhist perspectives since the 1950s and 1960s, the intersection of psychology and Buddhist practice, the flourishing of progressive educational ideals, and the growth of school psychology. It then briefly explores the kinds of citizenship ideals promoted by mindfulness practices as well as educators’ rationales for their implementation. Tracing this history demonstrates that, despite its relatively recent entry into schools and its promotion as a scientifically-based physiological practice, mindfulness is a phenomenon with deep historical roots within a particular British and North American social and cultural context. Exploring this context and the reasons for educators’ turn to mindfulness will help us better understand our modern education system and the kinds of students it aims to produce.&#x0D;

Call and Response: SEM President’s Roundtable 2018, “Humanities’ Responses to the Anthropocene”

Call and Response: SEM President’s Roundtable 2018, “Humanities’ Responses to the Anthropocene”

Writing Lifestories: A Methodology Introducing Students to Multicultural Education Utilizing Creative Writing and Genealogy

In this article, the author describes how she used a university course book assignment to produce a family history book to: (1) Raise consciousness and deepen understandings of other cultures, (2) assist students’ understanding of how intersecting cultures become part of the complex American cultural landscape, and (3) introduce students to research utilizing genealogical tools. The assignment aims to provide freshmen and preservice teacher education students an opportunity to recover personal memories and retell family stories, meld personal fragments into context by researching the historical and cultural backgrounds of their ancestors and produce a work that captures the interior life of a culture where each of us came. This calls for using “historical memory” to recover personal memories and retell family stories. Lastly, the knowledge gained from the Writing Lifestories: Exploring Cultural Heritages’ (2019) course will help students understand and heighten an awareness of multiculturalism/multicultural education through creative writing and immersion into research.

Stigma Cities: The Reputation and History of Birmingham, San Francisco, and Las Vegas by Jonathan Foster

Reviewed by: Stigma Cities: The Reputation and History of Birmingham, San Francisco, and Las Vegas by Jonathan Foster Jordan R. Cissell STIGMA CITIES: The Reputation and History of Birmingham, San Francisco, and Las Vegas Jonathan Foster. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK., 2018. xiv + 274 pp.; illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95 (cloth) (ISBN-13: 978-0-8061-6071-9). Birmingham, Alabama; San Francisco, California; and Las Vegas, Nevada, are three American cities with three very different reputations: Birmingham as violently racist "Bombingham"; San Francisco as America's "gay Mecca"; and Las Vegas as debaucherous "Sin City." In Stigma Cities: The Reputation and History of Birmingham, San Francisco, and Las Vegas, Jonathan Foster convincingly argues that the popular stereotype of each city has played and continues to play an influential role in shaping its social, cultural, and economic trajectories. Therefore, to understand each of these cities, it is imperative that we also understand its reputation. Toward this end, Foster catalogs the events that informed popular conceptions (and misconceptions) of each city, broader cultural shifts that alternately intensified or mitigated the stigmatization of each city by the American public, and the reactions of city residents and leaders to their stereotypical role in the public consciousness. The result is a vibrantly written, thoroughly researched, and highly readable work that will appeal to urban, historical, and cultural geographers, particularly those interested in the Southeastern and Western United States. Foster is a historian, and this book's theoretical and methodological framework draws primarily from the disciplines of history, sociology, and media studies, but the author's subject and approach is also inherently geographical. By applying sociological concepts of stereotyping and stigmatization to cities, Foster adds valuable perspective to explorations of place-based identity within the field of geography. Scale also represents an interesting thematic undercurrent throughout the book, as most of the events that inspired each city's reputation occurred within a relatively small portion of its physical footprint: the 16th Street Baptist Church and surrounding blocks in Birmingham, the Castro District in San Francisco, and Fremont Street and the Strip in Las Vegas. The book is organized into six body chapters bookended by introduction and conclusion chapters. The six body chapters are paired by city: Chapters 2 and 3 focus on Birmingham, Chapters 4 and 5 on San Francisco, and Chapters 6 and 7 on Las Vegas. [End Page 87] The first chapter in each pair details the development of the stigma for each city, while the second examines the impact of the stigma on the city, its residents, and its position in the American cultural and economic landscapes. In each of these body chapters, Foster examines both the specific historical events and the national cultural contexts associated with the development and impact of stigmatization for each city. To do so, he draws upon an extensive array of sources, including scholarly publications, travel guides, inflight magazines, personal letters, online comments sections, and (most prominently) local and national news media. Birmingham began the 20th century as an industrial beacon of New South modernization. But the violent and highly publicized resistance to Civil Rights era reforms by some city residents and officials, including the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church and brutal anti-demonstration tactics from city commissioner Bull Connor, coincided with an American cultural and political shift toward condemnation of overt racism and segregation. In a nation keen on validating its new role as a moral compass for the post-WWII world, Birmingham was cast as the racist misfit in an otherwise progressive United States of America. This "Bombingham" image has continued to shape negative perceptions of Birmingham into the present day, with contemporary media portrayals of both related and unrelated events often referencing the 1963 bombing. Its origins as a Spanish mission, history of port-town cosmopolitanism, and associations with the Beat Generation and 1960s counterculture had long characterized San Francisco as "not quite American" (p. 70). This perceived otherness set the stage for the stigmatization of the city as the center of the United States' gay community, a stereotype firmly entrenched in the American consciousness by national coverage of Harvey Milk's election to the San...

Trajectories in Argentine Children's Literature: Constancio C. Vigil and Horacio Quiroga

Children's author and publishing entrepreneur Constancio C. Vigil was a Uruguayan who spent most of his working life in Argentina. He was best known for his children's magazine Billiken (1919 to present). Vigil's contemporary and compatriot Horacio Quiroga also made the move across the River Plate and went on to have a transformative impact on Argentine literary culture, in part through his Jungle Tales for Children (1924). Both Quiroga and Vigil aspired to have their works for children accepted as school reading books, recognising the role of school authorities in the formation of the national canon. Vigil and Quiroga's trajectories of inclusion and exclusion, and their extraordinary contribution to the Argentine and Latin American cultural landscape in the first half of the twentieth century, provide a window onto the curation of an Argentine national children's literature at the same time as challenging the very nature of such a category.

Cultural Encounters: Glimpses of the United States in Late Twentieth-Century Romanian Travel Narratives

Abstract Travel narratives are complex accounts that include a significant layer of factual information – related to the geography, history, and/or the culture of a particular place or country – and a more personal layer, comprising the author’s unique perceptions and rendering of the travel experience. In the last thirty years of transition from a communist to a democratic society, the Romanians have been free to travel to any country they choose; however, during the communist period, especially during the 1980s, travelling to Western, capitalist countries, such as France, Great Britain, Canada, or the United States, was rather limited and fraught with complex issues. Still, Romanian travelers during that time managed to visit the United States, on diplomatic- or business-related exchanges, and published interesting travel stories of their experiences there. Therefore, this essay sets out to capture, from a comparative perspective, the impressions and encounters depicted by Radu Enescu in Between Two Oceans (1986), Ion Dinu in Traveler through America (1991) and Viorel Sălăgean in Hello America! (1992), with a view to analyzing how their descriptions and perceptions of two major urban spaces, New York City and San Francisco, reflect the complexity of the American social and cultural landscape in the late 1970s and mid-1980s.

The Appropriation of Mythologies for Assimilation through Media

Abstract With immigration one observes how immigrant communities actively contribute to the American cultural landscape by blending their traditions and cultural identities. This is commonly seen in music, television, and food cultures. Because of the urgency to maintain hegemony the same mediums are used to attack these groups. This is especially true when it comes to the aspect of mythologies in film and television. With a failure of American culture to acknowledge its mythological identity, dominant American culture whitewashes immigrant cultural identity to force assimilation.

Anthony Bukoski – An Outpost of Polishness

Isolated both geographically and psychologically, the Polish American writer Anthony Bukoski in his five collections of stories, Twelve Below Zero (1986, 2008), Children of Strangers (1993), Polonaise (1999), Time Between Trains (2003), and North of the Port (2008), as well as a collection of reissued stories Head of the Lakes (2018), assumes a variety of interrelated roles – chronicler, cultural archeologist, coastal guardsman, and spokesman – for the dwindling Polish community in his hometown of Superior, Wisconsin. Bukoski’s stories capture the distinct relationship between people and place in Superior, situated as it is the periphery of American life in northern Wisconsin. His stories shed light on the struggle to preserve a sense of Polishness, of community, in the face of isolation in the ethnically indistinct landscape of the Upper Midwest while living in a blue collar community that is aging and diminishing over time. Bukoski not only advocates for the right for this community to receive literary treatment, but he also takes on the many-faceted role of chronicler in attempting to preserve its struggles, enduring emotional markers, and memory. By defending and preserving, remembering and traversing, Bukoski creates an outpost of Polishness that captures a uniquely Polish space in the vast wilderness of the American cultural landscape. While his stories present a world that is vanishing before his eyes, he makes a case for its permanent inclusion on the American cultural and literary map.

The Post-Liberal Imagination: Political Scenes from the American Cultural Landscape. By Bruce Baum. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 257p. $110.00 cloth. - Politics and Beauty in America: The Liberal Aesthetics of P.T. Barnum, John Muir, and Harley Earl. By Timothy J. Lukes. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 234p. $110.00 cloth. - Politics and Time: Documenting the Event. By Michael J.

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Working the Delaware Estuary: African American Cultural Landscapes and the Contours of Environmental Experience

African American work patterns, particularly those concerned with the handling and extraction of natural resources or labor in agricultural or industrial settings, have been at the heart of efforts to better understand black environmental experience. But few studies have made African American cultural landscapes—specifically, those places heavily shaped by African American labor—the focus of efforts to better understand the black community's environmental experience and its wider societal relevance. Within Philadelphia's Middle Atlantic orbit, African Americans long participated in the environmental dynamics and transformation of the region defined by the Delaware Estuary and the use of its marine resources. This legacy has been visible principally through Thomas Eakins's well-known scenes depicting African Americans working in the region's shad fisheries or guiding railbird hunters through once bountiful wild rice areas and marsh. Working landscapes inspired these and other depictions, assemblages of buildings, boats, harvesting technology, housing, and marketplaces where African Americans honed their environmental acumen in the context of industrial, consumer, and racialized sentiment. From this perspective, African Americans and their cultural landscapes inextricably arbitrated the harvesting, processing, knowledge, commodity flow, and consumption of the region's signature marine resources. In short, the Delaware Estuary's reach within Philadelphia's metropolitan sphere was critically influenced by environmental experience forged in the cultural landscapes of African Americans.

Passion on the plate: A critical reflection on career change and personal cheffing

ABSTRACTThe culinary profession and discourses advocating the pursuit of passions have gained prominence in the American cultural landscape, along with having captured scholarly attention. Yet, research on career changes into culinary entrepreneurship is lacking. Drawing on interview and survey data, this article examines career changers' motivations for pursuing personal cheffing. Participants wanted to follow their passion, and they also were attracted to the autonomy and flexibility of personal cheffing. Most were satisfied with their new work, but this study also suggests some limitations to discourses promoting the pursuit of self-fulfillment through work. The physical toll and low and/or unstable pay were not ideal, and not everyone can feasibly prioritize self-fulfillment. Moreover, the social/cultural context and/or one's social position influence what passions are seen as possible careers and what activities feel self-fulfilling. The impetus to do what you love has the potential to reproduce existing social divisions and inequalities.

Maggie's Architecture: The Deep Affinities Between Architecture and Health

The event that sparked off the UK programme of Maggie's Centres for cancer care was one woman's diagnosis with terminal cancer. That woman was Maggie Keswick Jencks. With her husband, the American cultural theorist, landscape architect and architectural historian Charles Jencks, she set about co‐founding the pioneering project that has seen an array of high‐profile international architects design acclaimed buildings where patients can face their diagnoses and undergo treatment in the most comforting and uplifting of environments. Here, Charles Jencks gives his account of the story so far and explains what it is that makes these centres so special.

Lifting the “Veil” Off the Literature of the Arab American Diaspora

Although Arab-American literature has been in existence in the U.S. for over a century, it has only recently begun to be recognized as part of the ethnic landscape of literary America. However, the last two decades have seen a dramatic increase in the publication by Arab-American writers. This literary burgeoning reflects in part the shifting historical, social, and political contexts that have pushed Arab-Americans to the foreground, creating both new spaces for their voices and new urgencies of expression, as well as the flourishing creativity of these writers. From the 500-years-long presence of the Arabs on the North American continent, I have chosen three significant moments of reference, defining for the construction of the Americans’ awareness of the Arabic presence in the American cultural landscape.