American Cultural Studies Research Articles

Latin American, Caribbean, and Colombian cultural studies trajectories: Cartographies of the relation between culture and power in the region

ABSTRACT This article presents a particular trajectory of Latin American and Caribbean intellectual practices as a contribution to the effort of pluralizing the various genealogies of Cultural Studies conversations, projects, and research and political agendas from a global perspective. It departs from what could be thought as a strategic port encompassing both the analytic of the complex, dynamic, and intertwined relation between culture and power and the recognition of intellectual practices as key elements not only for the diagnosis of the present conjuncture; but also for imagining and enabling other futures. From this vantage point, different intellectual traditions interpellated or not with the cultural studies label are described to historize the Cultural Studies project as one produced from the peripheries of the World System. The article argues that this was the pool of intellectual practices that inspired the institutionalization of Cultural Studies in Colombia in the 1990s. Finally, it describes some of the most pressing and relevant research agendas in the present while arguing that today Cultural Studies in the country is not only an academic project inside universities.

Queer Transformation and Intersectional Identities: Analysing Race and Sexuality in Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits

This article offers an in-depth examination of Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits, contextualizing its narrative within the frameworks of Queer theory and African American cultural studies. Set against the backdrop of a rural North Carolina community, the novel focuses on the experiences of Horace Cross, a young African American grappling with his homosexuality amidst the constraints of a Christian Fundamentalist society. The analysis explores how the novel navigates themes of race, sexuality, and identity, particularly through Horace’s quest for self-transformation. This study underscores the novel’s intricate exploration of these themes, positing queer transformation as a pivotal element that provides insight into the complexities of identity and community within the African American context. Additionally, the article examines the novel’s integration of popular culture references, revealing their role in bridging the discussions of racial and sexual identity. The aim is to shed light on Kenan’s narrative as a significant contribution to the discourse on intersectionality in literature, highlighting its impact in the broader fields of Black and queer studies.

Applying Latin American Cultural and Literary Studies to Diversity Management Education

In today’s business environment, where Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEI&B) efforts are more prominent than ever, organizational leaders must be equipped to address complex interpersonal issues. In this exercise, we present an experiential exercise that provides a framework for addressing complex interpersonal issues in the workplace. The exercise utilizes some of the tenets of testimonio, a theory grounded in Latin American cultural and literary studies to guide the discussion of mini-cases. This exercise guides students through the understanding of interpersonal workplace scenarios, taking into account the experiences of employees from both social and legal perspectives, and developing multiple solutions while anticipating the consequences of those solutions. This exercise was developed with in-person graduate or undergraduate classes in mind.

Immigrant Exclusion Acts: On Early Chinese Labor and Domestic Matriarchal Agency in Lin Yutang’s Chinatown Family

In the introduction to her influential work on Asian American cultural studies and feminist materialist critique, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, Lisa Lowe shatters the contradictions manifested in Asian immigration, wherein Asians’ entry into the United States marked them either as marginalized from “within” the national political sphere or as linguistically, culturally, and racially “outside” of the national polity For Asian immigrants, the debate of being simultaneously needed and excluded is no more evidenced historically than using Chinese labor during the California Gold Rush in the mid-nineteenth century. Their migratory relocation was hardly met with ease and public enthusiasm, however. Evoking anxiety in their Anglo counterparts, the Chinese were characterized as foreign noncitizens: barbaric, alien, and dangerous, the quintessential “yellow peril” threatening to displace white European immigrants such as the Irish. The irrational fear of the “Oriental” from the Far East led to a succession of immigration exclusion laws passed by Congress that denied the Chinese from entering the U.S. and their rights to naturalization in 1882. Passed by Congress and signed by President Chester A. Arthur, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act suspended the entry of Chinese laborers into the U.S. based on their nationality for ten years. This paper argues that the possibility of agency for Chinese workers existed throughout the exclusionary period. Specifically, this site of agency resides with Chinese women and is expressed through a literary mode. For instance, Lin Yutang’s Chinatown Family (1948) captures this moment of immigrant agency in the post-exclusion era. Lin, a pioneering Chinese writer and inventor who wrote texts such as My Country and My People (1935), The Importance of Living (1937), and Moment in Peking (1939), often utilized his narratives to bridge the clash between the East and West. Identifying what I see as the inadequacy of probing one of the earliest Chinese American texts from a rigid literary mode, I move to reconsider the novel as a legal counternarrative to the three exclusionary laws: the Page Law of 1875, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the Cable Act of 1922. To direct my critical reorientation of Lin’s novel away from, though not necessarily against, literary castings of this early immigrant tale, I take the narrative as a strategic literary re-imagination that structures itself around these three legislative pieces to critique restrictive practices enacted upon the Chinese. The novel showcases how Chinese immigrants maneuvered and manipulated the legal system in their favor during assimilation. In this context, critical reappraisal is needed in scrutinizing how the Exclusion Act generated a wave of domestic-based diasporic relocation of Chinese workers from California to New York. Due to acute anti-Chinese sentiments on the West Coast, resetting Chinese workers in the northeast in search of a new Gold Mountain led to a unique phenomenon. This dispersal elevated Chinese women as valuable social capitals who transformed metropoles like New York City and redefined their views as nationalist subjects of the “about-to-be” in industrial capitalist modernity. Through a legal framework, then, Lin’s portrayal of the Fong clan suggests the emergence of a gendered Sino-immigrant agency, one that enabled the Chinese woman/mother to situate herself as the locus of the traditional patriarchal Chinese entrepreneurial family and the forefront of the northeast industrial capitalist scene.

Entrevista a Walter Mignolo e Catherine E. Walsh

Catherine E. Walsh (1964) had her initial experiences as an activist at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), influencing her academic interests in pedagogy, decoloniality, and feminism. After completing her Ph.D. in Education in 1984, she worked at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and Boston until the mid-1990s when she permanently relocated to Ecuador. Among her many activist contributions, she stands out for her work alongside Paulo Freire and the critical pedagogy network in the 1990s, bilingual education and consulting projects for indigenous communities in Ecuador, and the establishment of the Fondo Documental Afro-Andino, jointly with Afro-Ecuadorian community leader and intellectual Juan García Salazar in 2002, with whom she co-authored To Think Sowing/To Sow Thinking with Grandfather Zenon (2017). Notable among her various works are the edited volumes Decolonial Pedagogies (2013), On Decoloniality (in collaboration with Walter Mignolo, 2018), and her latest work, Rising Up, Living Up. Re-Existances, Sowings, and Decolonial Cracks (2023, Duke University Press). She recently retired as a professor and director of the Ph.D. program in Latin American Cultural Studies at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar (Quito, Ecuador). Walter Mignolo (1941) specialized in Semiotics and Literary Theory and has made extensive contributions to the fields of modernity and coloniality. His work prominently explores the concepts of decoloniality, global colonialism, geopolitics of knowledge, border thinking, and pluriversality. He is a central figure in the Latin American decolonial thought school, with a profound impact on global academic discourse. The author of several books translated into other languages, notable among them, in addition to On Decoloniality, co-authored with Walsh, are The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (1996), winner of the Katherine Singer Kovaks Award, The Idea of Latin America (2006), winner of the Frantz Fanon Award, and his most recent work, The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (2021). He has been working at Duke University since 1993, where he holds the distinguished title of «William H. Wannamaker» as a professor of Literature and Romance Studies. The works developed by Walsh and Mignolo are an extension of the concept of coloniality initiated by the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano, whom they consider disciples.

On (missing) links between German, Latin American, and French Mediatization Research: Reflections on Diverse Research Milieus and Their Traditions

Mediatization research is no European invention, being also rooted in Latin American Cultural Studies and semiotics. Building on an analytical scheme on how to analyze the history of a study field in communication research in terms of its corpus of ideas and its social corpus, this article discusses the transnational (dis-)connections in the field of mediatization research regarding a) the Latin American and French roots of this research field and b) by trying to answer why they are still so unknown, at least in German communication studies. Still today, E. Verón, Martín-Barbero, A. Mattelart, and others are more or less unknown authors in German communication studies.

“Beyond Railroads and Internment”? Japanese American Wartime Incarceration Literature and the Foundations of Asian American Literary Studies

This article sees post–World War II wartime incarceration literature as a multigenerational corpus and reassesses the handling of this material in Asian American literary criticism and cultural analysis. As a way of addressing the expanding corpus of wartime incarceration literature, which includes generations of descendant writers, the article proposes a cognitive mapping of the ten major spaces of Japanese American Wartime Relocation Authority (WRA) mass incarceration sites, which were built in spatial overlap or in geographic proximity to Native American historic sites of violent conflict and confrontation throughout the nineteenth century. It argues for the centrality of this intergenerational Japanese American corpus in Asian American and US literary and cultural studies, anchored as the body of work is in the historical trajectories of US imperialism and settler colonialism.

From media to mediations: unexpected readings

This essay critically reviews Jesús Martín-Barbero's 1987 book, “De los medios a las mediaciones”, and its influence on Latin American cultural studies after its first decade of publication. Highlighting the work's seminal contributions, it also underscores its participation in the emergence of dialogues and interdisciplinary studies on mass and popular culture. The essay acknowledges Martín-Barbero's distinctive intellectual practices, which set him apart from other traditions in communication studies: his ability to redefine—or localize—a rebellious, yet fruitful relationship with European critical theory, the potential in the reappropriation of ideas, and the mindful transformation of his oeuvre attuned to audience reception and engagement.

John T. Lowney (1957–2022)

This past September admired friend and respected scholar, John T. Lowney, passed away at the age of 65. John was professor of English at St John’s University in Queens, New York.John’s work explored the cultural politics of how modernism has been constructed in the literary history of the United States. His first book, The American Avant-Garde Tradition: William Carlos Williams, Postmodern Poetry, and the Politics of Cultural Memory (Bucknell UP, 1997), focused on Williams as an avant-garde writer in the early modernist period during and after World War 1 and elaborated the complex literary and cultural politics of Williams’s reception as a poet through the late 1950s and 1960s. His scholarship on twentieth-century American poetry and literary culture continued in History, Memory, and the Literary Left: Modern American Poetry, 1935–1968 (U of Iowa P, 2006).Over the years, his writing on Williams included other essays and reviews—including, most recently, “Williams: The New Poetries and Legacy” in The Cambridge Companion to William Carlos Williams (Cambridge UP, 2016) and “Reflections on Bryce Conrad’s Historiography” in the William Carlos Williams Review (2018). In addition, John’s scholarship in African American literary and cultural studies, and jazz literature, includes Jazz Internationalism: Literary Afro-Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Black Music (U of Illinois P, 2017) as well as essays in American Literature, The Langston Hughes Review, Melus, and The African American Review. His intellectual work was recognized with grants from the Donald C. Gallup Fellowship in American Literature at Yale’s Beinecke Library and a National Endowment for the Humanities Study Grant.During our PhD studies, writing about Williams, we both read John’s work. We also remember John as approachable and engaging, quietly spoken and sharply intelligent, with a sense of humor amid the often overly serious atmosphere of academic conference. Moreover, he was a generous and sensitive reviewer, including a review of Ian’s first book that came out of the PhD studies his own work had helped along. We celebrate his contributions as we mourn the loss of a colleague and friend. Though we are confident that John’s voice will continue to inspire continuing explorations of Williams’s ongoing presence in the tradition of American poetry and poetics.

Review: God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the California Myth, by David Leaf

Book Review| June 01 2023 Review: God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the California Myth, by David Leaf David Leaf. God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the California Myth. London: Omnibus Press, 2022. 480 pages. Grant Wong Grant Wong University of South Carolina Grant Wong is a Ph.D. student in history at the University of South Carolina specializing in the study of twentieth-century American pop culture and consumerism. Email: gwwong@email.sc.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Email: gwwong@email.sc.edu Journal of Popular Music Studies (2023) 35 (2): 127–129. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.2.127 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Grant Wong; Review: God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the California Myth, by David Leaf. Journal of Popular Music Studies 1 June 2023; 35 (2): 127–129. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.2.127 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Popular Music Studies Search Brian Wilson concerts are strange affairs. The 80-year-old rock virtuoso, for all of his skill as a producer, composer, and vocalist, never truly has been comfortable as a live performer. His bandmates sound fantastic. What else to expect from Beach Boys Al Jardine and Blondie Chaplin? The real allure of a Brian Wilson concert is not the music, but the artist’s presence. During most shows, Brian sits solitary at his piano, flubbing lyrics in an aging baritone distant from the angelic falsetto of his youth. The crowds cheer anyway. They give him standing ovations and yell for encores. This past July, at the Jones Beach Theater on Long Island, I know I did. He’s Brian Wilson. And he deserved all of the love we gave him. This love drives God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the California Myth, the latest edition of music writer... You do not currently have access to this content.

Cultural Capital: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

<i>Cultural Capital</i>: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

Jewish Cultural Studies by Simon J. Bronner

Reviewed by: Jewish Cultural Studies by Simon J. Bronner Jacqueline Laznow Simon J. Bronner. Jewish Cultural Studies. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2021. xix + 458 pp. In Jewish Cultural Studies, Simon Bronner summarizes his long and prolific academic trajectory. The book consists of updated versions of his published work with additional new material dealing mainly with the digital world and COVID-19. Bronner focuses on three folklore and ethnographic themes, conceptualization, ritualization, and narration, while interrogating objects, patterns, frames, and practices identified as Jewish in North America. His aim is to discern what makes them Jewish, why, and by whom. By doing so, he draws the boundaries of what he conceptualizes as Jewish cultural studies, a separate but complementary entity to traditional Jewish studies. In addition, Bronner argues that general American cultural studies do not recognize Jews as an ethnic group and points to the struggles of Jewish cultural studies in North America to find its place in academia since the twentieth century. Bronner considers the book an example of what he calls “the Chutzpah of Jewish Cultural Studies” (1). Through case studies and personal narratives, he points to the complexity of defining what Jewish culture is nowadays, raising the need to dare to examine Jewish daily praxis and rituals while considering the local context and the outsider’s gaze. He points to the fact that Jews, outside of Israel, have always been a minority group concerned with the maintenance and representation of their heritage, which makes them a unique cultural group with its own frame of mind. Reference to contemporary Israel as a multicultural Jewish center where folklore and ethnography researchers face different challenges from those faced by American researchers adds some depth to the otherwise American-centered arguments. Nevertheless, the description in chapter 4 of the history of Jewish folklore research, with an emphasis on S. An-sky’s collection of Jewish folktales in early twentieth-century Europe, Dov Noy’s work in Israel, and Haya Bar-Yitzhak’s description of their legacy, lacks reference to any of today’s prominent Israeli folklorists who engage in Jewish cultural studies in Israeli academia. Moreover, from his American and postdiasporic perspective, Bronner states: “In America the tension between tradition and modernity is especially evident” (xiii). This determination is problematic, since in our digital world, well described by the author in chapter 10, Jewish communities mirror each other and appropriate modern traditions and rituals that suit their own cultural context, thus the tension between tradition and modernity affects all Jewish communities. One example of this tension is the debates over mixed-gender prayer at the Western Wall in Jerusalem between ultra-Orthodox and progressive Jewish streams. Another example is the issue of conversions performed by the Conservative and Reform movements in today’s Argentina despite a historic religious ban from 1927. The book consists of three parts. Part 1 discusses the formation of beliefs and ideas in the academy and in everyday life while pointing to the tangle between opposites: continuity and change, tradition and modernity, and past and future. Bronner argues that in the modern world, keeping and passing on tradition takes place to a great degree at home, while the media help promote traditions and rituals, sometimes altering them. He correctly argues, as many folklorists around [End Page 224] the world have shown, that ethnographic research on home praxis is enlightening. Thus, Bronner conducts an in-depth analysis of the dualities of “House” and “Home” while pointing to the cultural construction of the term “domestic” and the role of the stereotypical Jewish mother in Kitchen Judaism. Finally, he introduces the term: “Livingroom Judaism,” an exposition of Jewish symbols at home (79). Part 2 focuses on the ways rituals have been adapted, created, and imagined in modern Judaism. Bronner points to the traditional role of women in Jewish rituals but does not discuss gender issues in depth nor the leading part North American Jewish women took in breaking religious gender roles, mirrored in all Jewish communities around the world. Interpreting the bar mitzvah as a celebration that connects father and son, he portrays the ritual as a masculine expression of tradition in spite of the actual feminized synagogue. Bronner further...

Imperial Educación: Race and Republican Motherhood in the Nineteenth-Century Americas by Thomas Genova

Reviewed by: Imperial Educación: Race and Republican Motherhood in the Nineteenth-Century Americas by Thomas Genova Felipe Martínez-Pinzón Keywords International Education, Nation Formation, Republicanism, Motherhood, Gender, Race, Thomas Genova, Felipe Martínez-Pinzón genova, thomas. Imperial Educación: Race and Republican Motherhood in the Nineteenth-Century Americas. U of Virginia P, 2021, 342 pp. Imperial Educación: Race and Republican Motherhood in the Nineteenth-Century Americas offers a refreshing approach to Latin American literary and cultural studies, specifically 19th-century studies, through rigorous transnational [End Page 323] archival work and a literary review of three national literatures placed in dialogue, friction and mutual influence: the United States, Cuba and Argentina. As part of a recent trend in hemispheric studies of our 19th-century literatures, alongside important names and titles in Hemispheric Studies such as Ronald Brigg's The Moral Electricity of Print: Transatlantic Education in Lima Women's Circuit, 1876–1910 (2017) and Rodrigo Lazo's Writing Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (2005), Thomas Genova offers a nuanced analysis of a critical trope—or at least one that reveals itself as critical thanks to his book—to the construction of the American republics as "Bourgeois Republics": the racialized figure of the republican mother as teacher, and the teacher as mother. Spanning the mid-19th century all the way to the postwar Spanish–Cuban–American war of 1898, Genova traces this trope in a fascinating array of canonical and noncanonical literary texts, as well as in legal writings, poetry, private correspondence, political essays, travelogues and memoirs. His book offers new readings of classics such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Viajes: Europa, Africa, América (1849), Cirilo Villaverde's Cecilia Valdés (1882), and James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826), in dialogue with other, lesser known texts that reveal the outstanding level of hemispheric cultural porosity among foundational novels, travelogues and memoirs. In conversation with scholarship that reads nationalism and regionalism as a reaction and at the same time a product of imperialism, Genova invites us, among other original interventions, to read Eduarda Mansilla's Lucía Miranda as an old creole Hispanophile's reaction to the Americanization of the national-civilizatory discourse mobilized by Sarmiento's readings of Cooper. The book also offers nuanced readings of Mary Mann's recently recovered Juanita (1887) and Martín Morúa Delgado's (1891) Sofía as different, yet dialoguing, interventions about what model of cultural reproduction (or miscarriage) is better suited for racially diverse republics such as Cuba. Genova's central argument is that education—as a republican duty assigned to women—traversed the debates about how to civilize and incorporate into the fledgling republic a vastly diverse panorama of racialized peoples. The consequences of focusing on the crossings of education, gender and race with a hemispheric scope are manifold and inspiring. First, in line with other scholars, this crossing entails seeing Latin America as a "deeper South" that partakes of northern North American stereotypes of the US South. Secondly, and stemming from this, Genova invites us to see the cultural (and sometimes familial) [End Page 324] connections between, say, the Cuban plantation elite and the US southern gentry. Thirdly, the book places emphasis on novelists writing foundational fictions at the end of the 19th century not only as writers but as readers of this particular genre, and as such, conscious of the narrative opportunities and shortcomings of this pedagogical literary corpus. Thanks to it, Cirilo Villaverde is uncovered as a reader not only of the mid-19th-century Latin American and US canon (Marmol's Amalia, Blest Gana's Martín Rivas or even Delaney's Blake?), and Cuban (Morúa Delgado) and non-Cuban writers (Mary Mann) are seen as readers that rewrite Cecilia Valdés (for Morúa Delgado this has been the typical read), but in doing so, center other ways of conceiving of gender, race and education in the island's turn-of-the-century literature. Imperial Educación is divided into two parts composed of three chapters each. Chapters one, two and three dwell on Argentina–US relations after Rosa's exile, while chapters...

Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema ed. by Carolyn Fornoff and Gisela Heffes

Reviewed by: Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema ed. by Carolyn Fornoff and Gisela Heffes Micah Mckay Fornoff, Carolyn and Gisela Heffes, eds. Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema. State U of New York Press, 2021. xiii + 361 pp. ISBN 978-1-4384-8404-4. What can the consummately human medium of film—movies are, of course, made by and for human beings—tell us about the needs, perspectives, and realities of nonhuman beings? And what can film do to interrogate its own seemingly inherent anthropocentrism? These are two of the fundamental questions addressed in Carolyn Fornoff and Gisela Heffes's edited volume Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema, the first book to bring to bear the preoccupations of ecocriticism, new materialism, and posthumanism on the study of Latin American film and an essential contribution to the burgeoning field of environmentally-minded Latin American cultural studies. To name just one other recent example, Lucy Bollington and Paul Merchant's edited volume Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human (2020) shares with Pushing Past the Human the desire to show how Latin American cultural texts can help us see beyond the notion of the human in order to better understand our place in the larger web of life. But, as Fornoff and Heffes put it in the introduction to their volume, this emerging critical enterprise highlights the fact that the epistemological move "beyond the human" does not mean leaving the human or human concerns behind; rather, it "warn[s] against losing sight of the human altogether" and "dramatiz[es] the inextricability of planetary care and social justice" (12). The productive tension between human and nonhuman concerns, social justice and planetary care, is one of the elements that gives Pushing Past the Human a sense of coherence and a sense of urgency in the context of ongoing and ever-accelerating environmental crises that are exacting heavy ecological and social tolls. Pushing Past the Human gathers together fifteen essays (including the introduction) written by scholars whose institutional homes are largely found in universities in the Unites States and Europe. Fornoff and Heffes's introduction makes a clear and concise argument for cinema's unique ability to allow viewers to consider the world beyond anthropocentric perspectives through technological innovations and filmmaking techniques that disrupt human timescales and represent ecological relationships that are difficult for the human sensorium to fully grasp. What is more, Fornoff and Heffes make a compelling case for the ability of Latin American cinema in particular to intervene in the theoretical and political debates of ecocriticism and posthumanism due to the region's history of colonialism, its experience of extractive capitalism, and the various modes of decolonial, and posthumanist thought that those experiences have given rise to (they engage, for instance, with Macarena Gómez-Barris's notion of "submerged perspectives" and Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's distillation of Indigenous people's experiences of the end of the world). In addition to providing a solid theoretical grounding for the volume, the introduction offers useful information about the development of ecocinema in Latin America and the wide array of film festivals that showcase it. The volume's other fourteen essays are divided into three thematic sections that address questions of cinematic genre, the staging of human/nonhuman difference, and [End Page 162] indigeneity. The first of these, "Genre Beyond the Human," features essays on the road movie, disaster films, documentary, and slow cinema. By paying close attention to the conventions of each of these genres (and the ways the films each author studies push against those conventions), these chapters offer valuable insights on, for example, the damages wrought by extractivism in the Brazilian Amazon (Patrícia Vieira) and the way cinematic depictions of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake are paradigmatic examples of Anthropocene cultural texts because they stage the interaction between deep time and human history in a way that complicates clear distinctions between "natural" and "human-made" catastrophes (Fornoff). The five chapters in "Encountering Difference," the volume's second section, engage with portrayals of animals raised for slaughter, the vibrant materiality of objects in film animation, lush rural landscapes...

Habits of the Millennial Heart: Individualism and Commitment in the Lives of Young, Underemployed Americans

ABSTRACT This article presents an exploratory mapping of millennial individualism. In doing so, it complicates the common popular and scholarly narrative that millennials as a generation are less committed to the broader social order. Instead, drawing from recent advances in the study of American culture, I show that millennial individualism can be compatible with extra-individual commitment. Analyses draw from in-depth interviews with a sample of underemployed millennials regarding their experiences with work and education, as well as their future orientations and life goals. Findings demonstrate that respondents relate to the broader social order using three styles of millennial individualism – self-realization, reflexive moralism, and utilitarian traditionalism. While the sample does not allow for generalization to the entire generation, the findings presented here demonstrate the clear potential of millennial individualism to translate into traditional institutional milestones, higher life purposes, and the greater good. Respondents with backgrounds from across the social class spectrum draw from individualistic discourses to construct an array of extra-individual commitments. Nevertheless, those from working-class backgrounds are more likely to orient their lives around the attainment of traditional milestones. In demonstrating how a group of millennials actually think about their lives in relation to society, findings suggest that millennial orientations may represent the latest iteration of American individualism rather than a break from the traditional social order.

ДРУГА НАУКОВА КОНФЕРЕНЦІЯ «США: ПОЛІТИКА, СУСПІЛЬСТВО, КУЛЬТУРА» В КНУ ІМЕНІ ТАРАСА ШЕВЧЕНКА

The strong support of the United States during the Russian war against Ukraine highlights the significant scholarly problem of the comprehensive study of American history (particularly foreign policy), culture, and US-Ukrainian relations. The mentioned directions define the activities of the educational program «American and European Studies (with the advanced program of foreign languages)» of the Department of Modern and Contemporary History of Foreign Countries at the Faculty of History of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. In January 2023, the Department held the second All-Ukrainian scientific conference «USA: Politics, Society, Culture,» dedicated to various aspects of the social, political, and cultural development of the United States of America. The conference took place online on the «Zoom» platform. It was primarily aimed at the participation of young researchers – students and graduate students who study the history, politics, society, and culture of the United States. At the same time, more experienced Americanists also participated, presenting their latest research developments. The main keynote speech at the plenary session was delivered by Valeriy Prystaiko, The main keynote speech at the plenary session was delivered by Valeriy Prystaiko, the Chief Consultant of the Military Policy Division at the Center for Security Studies of the National Institute for Strategic Studies (NISS), Candidate of Sciences in public administration. His report was focused on specific aspects of cooperation between Ukraine and the United States in the context of the full-scale war. The main work of the conference was organized into four sections: U.S. Foreign Policy and Relations with World States in the 21st Century; U.S. Foreign Policy and Relations with World States in the 20th Century; U.S. Foreign Policy Strategy; American Society and Culture. The conference materials have been published on the website of the Department of Modern and Contemporary History of Foreign Countries of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Video recordings of the most interesting reports are also available on the Department’s YouTube channel «American, European, and Oriental Studies». The experience gained from the conference «USA: Politics, Society, Culture» convincingly demonstrates the importance of such scientific forums for the development of Ukrainian American studies, the engagement and professional growth of young Americanist researchers, and the expert discussion and exchange of experience between younger and older generations of Ukrainian Americanists. In our opinion, scientific and cultural diplomacy plays a crucial role in deepening mutual understanding and cooperation between the Ukrainian and American peoples, particularly in countering Russian aggression in Ukraine and rebuilding our state. Therefore, we hope for the continuation of the tradition of annual conferences and other events that will contribute to the development of Ukrainian American studies.

Editorial Introduction

Editorial Introduction

Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands by Dustin Tahmahkera

Reviewed by: Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands by Dustin Tahmahkera Kerry Fine Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands. By Dustin Tahmahkera. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. 288 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, bibliography, filmography, index. $35.00 paper. In his new study of Indigenous representation, Dustin Tahmahkera (Comanche), the Wick Cary Endowed Chair in Native American Cultural Studies, builds a complex and nuanced study of Comanche presence in film and other types of media. Tahmahkera raises important questions of representational agency and power: “who represents whom, and in effect, who lays claim to Comanche significations” (11). In so doing, he engages with “Comanche” as a signifier in order to capture that power of representation to present Comanches as a living, breathing, contemporary peoples, rather than as a group frozen in the past, particularly the past as represented by the supposed fall of the Comanche empire, while also resisting a monolithic construction of Comanche representation and of the Comanche as a people. Tahmahkera grounds the project in the Comanchería, both in the traditional territory and reach of the Comanche and in their continued presence as the Comanche Nation, currently headquartered in Lawton, Oklahoma. The introduction and chapter 1 establish Tahmahkera’s guiding concepts and provide an informative, in-depth, and Comanche-centric examination of Comanches (both real and fictional) as cast, crew, and creators in film, including Tahmahkera’s great-great-great-grandfather, Comanche chief Quanah Parker. Importantly, Tahmahkera’s concepts, including the media borderlands, cinematic Comanches, and representational jurisdiction, serve as the ground for the rest of the book, which focuses on Disney’s The Lone Ranger (2013) and actor Johnny Depp’s notorious performance as [End Page 362] Tonto, a Comanche character. Though the book focuses on the film at length, it is not a study of the film, but rather an examination of the film positioned inside the Comanche-centered concepts and cinematic history. Chapter 2 provides an especially interesting and developed analysis of Johnny Depp’s controversial adoption by Comanche elder LaDonna Harris, which Tahmahkera positions as a contemporary captivity narrative that opens a space for Comanche influence in the production of the film. Importantly, the “capture” of Johnny Depp reveals important moves by Comanche elders and leaders to gain agency in the production of The Lone Ranger. Playing on the idea of capture/adoption as a way to replenish the tribe and establish networks of relationship, Harris’s savvy move presents a type of intervention that allowed the tribe to have more input than they otherwise might have had in the creation of the film and created actual benefits to the peoples represented in the film. Chapter 3 engages with the film in a more conventional, but still Comanche-centered, textual analysis, and chapter 4 presents a textured and focused Comanche-centered reception studies–type examination. Cinematic Comanches presents an important conjunction of Native American studies and film and media studies. Additionally, it illuminates both past and present Comanche participation in the representation of Comanche people across representative media, raising important conversations about the futurity of this representation and resisting the so-called fall of the Comanches by depicting them as a people very much participating in their culture, past, present, and future. Kerry Fine Department of English Arizona State University Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Afterword: Precarity, Pedagogy, and the Public

AfterwordPrecarity, Pedagogy, and the Public Krista Comer (bio) Anyone close to the academic job market or to humanities graduate students or early career PhDs will feel the urgency that coeditors Surabhi Balachander and Jillian Moore have put at the center of their introduction to this singular special issue. Conceived importantly as a platform for emerging scholars juried by their editor peers, WAL readers find seven essays that range widely in critical topics, in hybrid creative/critical methodologies, and in a sense of audiences for research well beyond university readers. We also find the coeditors’ arguments about new critical turns in the field of western American literary and cultural studies toward, as they say, the personal and the pedagogical. Underlying the case for these turns are serious questions about where, how, and from whom “critical turns” might come when the infrastructures that have supported graduate education, faculty research, and organizational longevity are being dismantled. In the face of humanities crises, defunded university research, far fewer new tenure lines, the collapse of the job market, and imperiled association memberships— including in the Western Literature Association—how will research grow and thrive? As Balachander and Moore note, nearly ten years have gone by since I edited a 2013 special issue for Western American Literature titled “Young Scholars.” The name, incidentally, came to be in the editorial process. My original call for papers was circulated as “Emerging Field Directions from Younger Scholars.” At the time, a set of critical interventions and openings seemed afoot in new research, and the hope was a special issue could provide opportunities for junior scholars and graduate students as well [End Page 193] as a significant occasion for the field. I hoped also to give back as someone who had had quite a time on the market myself; indeed, the year I was WLA President in 2002 I had just moved to assistant professor from a lecturer appointment. If I felt job prospects were urgent in 2002, in 2013 that urgency was different and deeper. The field keywords of that moment included “postwest,” “postregionalism,” and “critical regionalism.” Un-conflating these concepts, which were muddied in one another, allowed me in the introduction to track their divergent claims and politics and to address directly the implications of the concept of the rhizome, especially as they bore on feminist frameworks, settler colonialism, and Indigenous sovereignty—keywords that were then emergent. I remember the number of essays I received, far more than could be accepted for publication. When I look back at the abstracts—as I did in thinking about this special issue—and when I think of very recent conferences and WAL essays, I see in them all various critical turns that have since, in my view, become widespread alongside settler frameworks and Indigenous sovereignty, namely: land ethics, place accountability, climate justice, eco-grief, and climate dread. With this “Emerging Scholars” special issue, the precarity of humanities research itself is rightly registering as a focus for the field of western American literary and cultural studies. In the hands of contributors, the demands of precarious scholarly environments are forcing the issue of research that reaches toward new publics and audiences and speaks in voices that likely skirt the classic conceptual training of graduate seminars. This sea change in who any of us writes for, why we write, where we publish, and the ability to conceive of a public-oriented criticism read by nonspecialists, is extremely important. Unlike western writers or historians, literature and culture scholars of the US West have not been as institutionally well-placed or secure in universities or popular authority. The need to innovate research practice and method and expand our audiences is fundamental in order to survive as knowledge producers who make a difference in consciousness about what “the US West” means or does. In very different ways, both Alison Turner’s work in “Perfectly [End Page 194] Designed for Connections: Zine Making in Denver Shelters” and Mika Kennedy’s creative nonfiction piece, “Peregrination 2036,” point toward research methods that support a western American literary and cultural studies of the future. Turner’s engaged research practice is one of collaborative relation with writers and artists who she...

Erhan Şimşek: Creating Realities. Business as a Motif in American Fiction, 1865– 1929 (American Culture Studies, 25). Bielefeld: transcript, 2019.

Erhan Şimşek: Creating Realities. Business as a Motif in American Fiction, 1865– 1929 (American Culture Studies, 25). Bielefeld: transcript, 2019.