American Cultural Studies Research Articles

The purloined islands: Caribbean-U.S. crosscurrents in literature and culture, 1880-1959

Purloined Islands offers the first book-length exploration of literary and cultural exchanges between the United States and the Caribbean during the roughly eighty-year period of their greatest interaction, from the close of the Spanish-American War to the Cuban Revolution. The interconnected histories of colonization, migration, slavery, and political struggle thrust writers from both regions into a vibrant literary conversation across national borders. Jeff Karem charts this dialogue and its patterns of influence through an analysis of key literary and cultural sources in English, French, and Spanish, including a large body of rare archival evidence.What the author identifies in this wide-ranging exchange is the Caribbean's vital contribution not only to the literatures of the American hemisphere but also to the literary and intellectual culture of the United States itself. Specifically, he shows how such movements as pan-Africanism, the New Negro Renaissance, and pan-American modernism have significant Caribbean roots, although the United States has often failed to recognize them, effectively purloining those resources without acknowledgment. As his title's allusion to Poe's Purloined Letter suggests, Karem argues that the contributions of the Caribbean have been borrowed, appropriated, and nationalized by U.S. culture but are hidden in plain sight.Both its multilingual character and its emphasis on the reciprocity in cultural cross-currents will make the book of interest to readers not only in Caribbean and American cultural and literary studies but also in pan-American or border studies, Black Atlantic studies, and African American studies.

CULTURE AND POWER: INTERCULTURALITY AS A COMBINED POLITICAL, ETHICAL AND THEORETICAL PROJECT

A very important part of your work has been thinking about what are called ‘Studies in culture and power’ as a response to the hegemony of ‘Latin American Cultural Studies’. What are the core point...

Bishop Lamont and Hermeneutics of Play

This paper investigates the subject of hip-hop within the study of religion and the study of American religion and culture. In particular, the paper focuses on the corpus of California hip-hop artist Bishop Lamont in developing a "hermeneutics of play" through a combinative "lived religion" approach as a way of reading and reflecting on the larger religious significance of hip-hop in late 20th century America. As both a reading practice and a subject of study for both historians and religious studies scholars, hip-hop comes into view in this paper as an essential component in narrating an American religious history of the last three decades. Hip-hop and its study also reveals its own understandings of religion, America, and American religion as articulated through post-industrial and a variety of religious vocabularies that have been largely ignored by scholars of religion. In essence, this paper argues that by exploring the rhetorical, religious, and existential complexity found within hip-hop cultures, a more complex post-1965 American religious landscape emerges for both the historian and theorist of religion.

The Ladybird, the Dressing Gown and Pasolds: Cultural Icons of the 'Golden Age' of British Childhood

Applied to contemporary Western clothing as part of the new cultural turn in textile history, anthropology provides unique insights into the relationship between commerce and culture; into the symbolic and social processes that influence the market; and into the ways capitalism functions as a cultural system, not just as a purely economic one. This paper takes an anthropological approach to children's clothing and the changing consumer culture of childhood in Britain in the mid-twentieth century, seen through a particular company (Pasolds Ltd.), their Ladybird symbol and its associated popular culture, and an iconic garment, the Ladybird dressing gown. It provides a case study in a field and period dominated to date by studies of American children's garments and material culture and focuses on the production, advertising and indirect marketing of children's clothing through public culture, from the producer's point of view, a perspective hitherto generally overlooked in work on children's clothes and consumer culture in the mid-twentieth century.

What's Left for Latin American Cultural Studies?

This essay focuses on the role of the Left—as idea, as subject, as method, and as political praxis—in Latin American cultural studies. It briefly traces some of the key connections between Latin American cultural studies and Left politics to give readers less familiar with the field a sense of how these traditions have developed in relation to key historical shifts. It then moves to consider some of the current challenges to the Left work of Latin American cultural studies, especially as articulated in response to neoliberal forms of capital. The essay argues that Latin American cultural studies has had to confront the ways in which neoliberalism, as both ideology and economy, necessarily adjusts the ontological frameworks—such as the working class, the subaltern, the nation, the popular, the post-colonial, and “the people”—that have tended to organize Left political resistance. Given the fact that neoliberalism emerged as a force for social restructuring in Latin America at least a decade prior to its appearance in the United States and Europe, some of the insights of Latin American cultural studies scholars might well offer productive critical avenues for cultural studies scholars working outside the Latin American context.

Reframing the Study of American Visual Culture: From National Studies to Transnational Digital Networks

American culture in the twenty-first century is conceptually fraught with problems: new communications and media technologies make the visual imagery of American culture instantaneously accessible globally; the consumption of American goods and imagery is frequently a metonym for wealth, status, and power; and yet, just as often, American culture is seen as a polluting and contaminating force that threatens the integrity and viability of other cultures (see Figure 1). Even American scholars have flattened and oversimplified the idea of American culture as something fixed and stable. But American cultural identity is neither singular nor unitary; rather it is a constantly mutating social construct and the result of multiple of transcultural connections, transactions, negotiations, and exchanges. And its borders are permeable and porous; its mutating identity is elastic and slippery. This article considers the problems presented by a singular unitary construct of American visual culture specifically in today's world of exponentially expanding production and consumption of digitally produced visual images, of transactual global visual communications and transcultural identities. It argues for a reframing of the intellectual platforms of American (visual) culture studies in light of the fact that the primary sites of American transcultural transactions are increasingly visual. Moreover, the article explores how the history of American art and visual culture has already reframed its scholarly discourse to embrace a more relativist and complex conceptualization of American visual culture as a network of imbricated transcultural transactions. Finally, it proposes a new scholarly and pedagogical platform upon which future American (visual) culture studies might be built. Reframing American Visual Culture for the Twenty-First Century Many scholars argue today that the idea of a fixed or unitary consideration of culture(s) needs rethinking owing to the global transactions facilitated by communications technologies in the twenty-first century. Nicholas Mirzoeff, for example, argues that culture is less a fixed entity than a hybrid of networks in which the process of cultural exchange is perpetually (re)negotiated among cultures. Mirzoeff approvingly cites Fernando Ortiz who claimed that in any transaction among cultures, weak or strong, the cultures are changed and that accordingly all culture is (41). Additionally, the change is constant: transculture is a perpetual process of deculturation and reculturation of both the weak and strong (41). Thus, meaning in culture is a result of constant ongoing (re)negotiation of cultural identity as cultures reimagine and regenerate themselves. Cultures continually possess, alter and assimilate aspects of other cultures into their own. Mirzoeff thus concludes that all transculture is plural because transculture has no beginning or end and is always in transformation (43). Within this conceptual framework cultural meaning is located less in a search for a singular authenticity in culture than in transactions among (trans)cultures. Cultural meaning (transcultural narrative) cannot be comprehended either from a singular authoritative viewpoint or as a static entity; it can only be comprehended as moving and mutating, and it can only be observed in fragments from a transverse or oblique perspective and with an implicated eye. Within today's hybrid, global, visual communications networks, the construction of visual cultural identity is not monolithic. Rather, it is a constantly morphing multiplicity of transcultural transactions. Just as mechanical technology fundamentally transformed communication in the nineteenth century, digital technology is proving to be equally transformative in the twenty-first century. Digitally produced visual images have become America's most pervasive and widely consumed good. Those with access to digital technologies increasingly read, think, and communicate visually. …

Reading Ray: Reflections on Ray B. Browne's Writings and Reviews

Writing about Ray B. Browne is a labor of love. Ray said things that others were reluctant to say and wrote about odd topics, such as wallpaper, of little interest to the conventional academic. He had a major impact on innumerable lives and careers; for those who knew him well, he was a mentor, a colleague, and, for some, a hero. He spearheaded a new area of study, and his contributions to popular and American culture studies are legendary. Many who met Ray for the first time saw him as larger than life. He wrote or edited over seventy books, some of the most important of which are reassessed in this issue's book review section. He also persistently challenged graduate students and junior faculty to publish, present their scholarship, and ultimately become involved in the Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association. It was imperative to him that these organizations continue to evolve and thrive, and it is to his credit and tireless efforts that the PCA/ACA is still alive and well today with over three thousand members, representing many academic disciplines. As a former president of the PCA/ACA, I made two promises to Ray that were crucial for him: (1) that the two associations would continue to operate in the spirit in which they had been created- as a forum for scholars who didn't quite fit into other professional societies (Ray always did preach inclusivity rather than exclusivity), and (2) that the PCA/ACA would contribute to the Ray and Pat Browne Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University on a regular basis. I keep both of these promises. After Ray retired from his longtime position as founding editor of The Journal of Popular Culture and The Journal of American Culture, he continued on as book review editor of the latter. A prolific scholar, he not only oversaw a stable of reviewers but also contributed more than four hundred reviews himself. Although not exhaustive, a list of his reviews from March 2003 (26:1) through March 2010 (33:1), compiled by Camille McCutcheon, follows this essay. These reviews tell the story of a decade's worth of scholarship in American culture. It was not uncommon to read an assessment from Ray on almost any aspect of popular culture. He tried to include reviews (by himself or others) of every book that he received. This was particularly beneficial for teachers and scholars in that it enabled them to rapidly access new works in their fields and discover alternative texts for both undergraduate and graduate courses. Some of Ray's most unforgettable contributions from 2003 include reviews of books about Memorial Day, the Circus Age, and the Great Chicago Fire, as well as a portrait of Amazing Grace, America's most beloved song. In 2004, Ray penned analyses of publications about The West Wing and the American presidency, medieval food, and the Hardy Boys. …

Review Essay: Past Practices—Ethnography and American Religion

1151; electronic ISSN 1533-8568. © 2011 by The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/rac.2011.21.2.259. Review Essay: Past Practices—Ethnography and American Religion

Reading Nineteenth-Century American Boys

Reading Nineteenth-Century American Boys Joe Sutliff Sanders (bio) Boys at Home: Discipline, Masculinity, and "The Boy Problem" in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, by Ken Parille. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2009. Boys at Home is an important exploration of discipline and masculinity as they were understood in the northeastern United States between 1830 and 1885. Organized around "a series of arguments about five forms of pedagogy," it examines topics of clear importance to studies of both American culture and childhood: "play-adventure, corporal punishment, sympathy, shame, and reading" (xiii). In just under 130 pages, Ken Parille presents a dense, pointed argument that attempts "to reconstruct and reinterpret the pedagogical culture surrounding boys" (xviii). Using readings of work by historical and literary figures including Horace Mann, Jacob Abbot, Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, and Lydia Sigourney, Parille seeks to correct misconceptions that resonate across key theories of boys and their management. One of Parille's main concerns is avoiding—indeed, contradicting—the notion that boys can be explained as one great, undifferentiated mass. Here he speaks to a central fear in children's literature scholarship of contributing to cultural tendencies to theorize childhood through a disembodied subject known as "the child" rather than a heterogeneous subject known as "children." Parille's vigilance against broad assumptions about "the boy" is both obvious and necessary. His hope, as he says in his introduction, is that "Writings about boyhood discipline offer us an important way to complicate current critical narratives of gender, childhood, and literary history" (xiii). This goal is not always unequivocally achieved—the material Parille studies is frequently about boys in general, and it best positions his study to draw conclusions that are similarly about ideal rather than embodied children—but it is a hope to which Parille is consistently dedicated, and he uses a clever redundancy to add nuance to the clichés of his subject matter. By putting multiple, contemporaneous forms of pedagogy in dialogue with one another, Parille is able to point to contradictions between conceptions of "the boy," effectively forcing a more sophisticated image of boys than the writers of his subject material would themselves have recognized. As Parille puts it, "The picture of boyhood created by this [End Page 278] nexus of relationships offers us a detailed portrait of the pedagogical environment in which New England boyhood was constructed, and it gives us a multitude of perspectives ranging far beyond those of the few nineteenth-century literary figures who have monopolized critical discourses on 'the boy'" (xiv). His choice of material is therefore appropriate and even courageous, considering how very hot is the button he pushes when reading texts by writers who were invested in boyhood as a broad concept, not one full of contradictions. Similarly courageous is the book's dedication to speaking of topics central to Americanist discourse outside children's literature—such as nineteenth-century US social structures and the history of corporal punishment—in terms that emphasize rather than ignore gender. Such a strategy requires walking a narrow line. In such collections as Chapman and Hendler's Sentimental Men and Davidson and Hatcher's hyperbolically titled No More Separate Spheres!, Americanist editors and writers have criticized the tendency to consider sentimental and realist, domestic and public, feminine and masculine as completely discrete literary and social categories. The frequent result of such criticism is excellent scholarship that profitably reexamines the places where these categories blur, but other results have included poor scholarship that willfully ignores places where recognition of such categories might yield a more historically informed reading of literature. Parille, however, manages to tap into this current trend in Americanist scholarship without quite abdicating a reading that is aware of gender. He mentions on many occasions his interest in masculinity studies, and as a result his argument is not quite that gender should be ignored, but that insights gained through attention to one gender should be tested for usefulness when reading texts written for another. Thus he argues for a "threefold approach" in which he attempts to consider boys' fiction and girls' fiction by attending to "similarity, difference, or a combination of the two" (xxiii). He calls his study a "dual-gender...

Notas sobre José Carlos Mariátegui y los „estudios culturales‟

In this article our purpose is to establish a dialogue between Mariátegui and „cultural studies‟, taking into account variants of the field in Europe, US and Latin America. In the first place, we analyze some topics of Mariategui‟s work, like race, tradition and literature in Perú, that may be considered nodal themes in 'cultural studies' tradition. Secondly, we explore his approach to cultural issues starting from an overall view of his career (trade-union, political and intellectual) and in connection with his interpretation of Marxism. Our hypothesis is that the analysis of Mariategui‟s reflections will give us new conceptual and methodological tools to consider a number of issues that are currently present on the agenda of 'Latin American cultural studies', but it will also allow us to introduce new arguments in the debate on institutionalization and de-politicization of the field.

Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y cabareteras on the Transnational Stage (review)

Reviewed by: Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y cabareteras on the Transnational Stage Jessica Lynam Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y cabareteras on the Transnational Stage. University of Texas Press, 2010. by Laura G. Gutiérrez. 1. Sex in the performing arts—Mexico. 2. Lesbians in the performing arts—Mexico. 3. Music-halls (Variety-theaters, cabarets, etc.)—social aspects —Mexico. 4. Women entertainers—Mexico. 5. Women performance artists—Mexico. In this book, Gutiérrez employs the notion of “unsettling comforts” to call attention to the disruptive, transgressive quality of the queer cabaret and performance artists she studies. Such disruptions or transgressions challenge heterosexual national and nationalist culture, provoking audiences to question heteronormative paradigms. Additionally, Gutiérrez uses the concept of “unsettled comfort” to refer to the in-between space inhabited by queer artists. The author suggests that “in betweenness, particularly for minoritarian subjects, may, in fact, be the home address of all those involved in a queer world-making project” (20). This discomfort or unsettled comfort, she argues, opens a productive space for analysis. Performing Mexicanidad is divided into two parts, the first of which concerns the ways in which several contemporary Mexican and Mexican American visual, performance and video artists interrogate national identity and its relationship with gender roles by appropriating and re-imagining feminine icons of Mexican national identity. For instance, Gutiérrez explores the ways in which Mexican and Chicano/a visual [End Page 220] artists have deployed the image of the Virgen de Guadalupe, re-inscribing her with new meanings, as well as the critical response to such re-inscriptions. Other icons of femininity such as the china poblana, the rumbera figure popularized in the golden age of Mexican melodrama, and the female subjects of ranchera music standards become subject to re-visioning by the cabareteras Astrid Hadad, Jesusa Rodríguez, Liliana Felipe and Regina Orozco, as well as the video artist Ximena Cuevas. These artists’ performances serve to parody and interrogate the masculinist and heteronormative discourses that figure prominently in the Mexican national identitary, opening a space for a queer Mexican identity while inscribing the artists in a long-standing tradition of rule-bending women performers. In the second part of the book, Gutiérrez profiles the avant-garde Chicana performance artist Nao Bustamante and Mexican video artist Ximena Cuevas, demonstrating that both women avail themselves of dominant mass-media forms in order to undertake “queer performative interventions.” Bustamante and Cuevas move beyond the traditional, contained spaces of the museum or stage in their artistic production, such as when Bustamante appears in character as a sexual deviant on the Joan Rivers show or Cuevas spools out a fabricated homosexual love affair with another artist for the benefit of a tabloid magazine. The author’s “coda” to the book describes how Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe have left behind the enclosed space of the cabaret in order to take to the streets. She argues that in abandoning the cabaret, these artists transcend social, sexual and political borders to contest neoliberal policies of the Calderón administration through public performances and acts of civil disobedience. Drawing on a broad base of performance studies, queer and feminist theory, Gutiérrez also clearly delineates and acknowledges the challenges and limitations inherent to using live art as an object of study. Perhaps because of such limitations, Gutiérrez’s close readings of Astrid Hadad’s “Heavy nopal” aesthetics and Nao Bustamante’s stage performances become vital to familiarize readers with pieces of cultural production that are ephemeral by nature and often unavailable for reviewing. This is especially true because Gutiérrez uses these and other anecdotal performances to illustrate methodological concerns raised at the intersection of sexuality, language, politics, nationalism and art, and in order to unsettle further comforts: those conventions that she considers as having, until now, largely conformed scholarly production on literature, film, and material culture of Latin America. In general, as a call to acknowledge the careful and detained study of embodied performances as important avenues for scholarship in Latin American cultural studies, Performing Mexicanidad succeeds most where it leads by example. Jessica Lynam Christopher Newport University Copyright © 2011 The Board of Regents of the University of Arizona

Digital Technology and Teaching American Culture

Popular Culture is the voice of this world, spoken in a thousand languages. Popular Culture Studies are therefore the New Humanities, intended to take up all the subjects singly and collectively and bring some order and understanding to the seeming chaos . . . we must of course study the Humanities internationally and comparatively. No longer is American scholarship defensibly a continent mentality. It is a world mentality. (Ray B. Browne, Theory-Methodology Complex 149) We are global. We are digital. These forces feed and grow off one another. In the twenty-first century it seems almost old-fashioned to think anything less. The statistical evidence supporting the ubiquity of digital technology is staggering. One group calculates that total worldwide Internet growth has increased some 445 percent from 2000 to 2010, encompassing nearly two billion users globally (Miniwatts). Another popular indicator of the digital present and future is the seemingly ever-increasing size of Facebook's population, which reportedly exceeds five hundred million active users, who spend seven hundred billion minutes per month on the site (Statistics). There is no doubt that digital technology is a critical component of popular culture, weaving its way through virtually every aspect of society. Indeed, no aspect of mass communications is left unaffected by the rush toward digitalization. What is less clear, however, is the cumulative outcome that all-pervasive digital culture is having on teaching American culture studies. Much of the evidence is anecdotal, whether one stands for or against the Web and electronic technology as it pertains to how think and learn (Johnson 9-14). This essay combines a broad array of electronic threads to reveal a new way of looking at teaching American culture in the digital age. What quickly becomes apparent is that the US role as the world's innovation hub fuels much of its continuing leadership in digital technology, thus propelling a vision of America worldwide. In other words, the nation's culture (both real and imagined) seeps into the products of its technology exporters, such as Apple, Microsoft, and Google. In addition, America serves as the epicenter of mass media globally, whether streaming from the film and television studios in Hollywood or the countless journalists who dominate the multitude of channels that feed the nation's seemingly insatiable appetite for news and entertainment. In this instance, one could point to Disney's ability to export both its traditional animated characters and teen stars globally (such as Miley Cyrus) as a model for how a particular view of America is presented overseas. From a historic viewpoint, American culture has dominated global popular culture based on its technological leadership of Web-based and consumer technology (Ashby 512-17). As these innovations are adopted outside the United States, they actually become less American and more global. Technologist James W. Cortada explains, Collaborative behavior, rather than just adversarial actions, has been increasing thanks to the nature of IT; indeed, the technology itself has conversely been molded in service to make collaboration more possible than in any time in human history, to the extent that today it involves billions of people (252). In other words, as American Web sites, applications, high-tech gadgets, and consumer goods disperse globally and gain market share, they simultaneously become less US-centric, even as they remain influenced by American culture. Specifically analyzing Facebook and Apple (in terms of iPod, iPhone, and iPad ubiquity), for example, one sees these technologies as distinctly part of American culture, but worldwide adoption causes them to be simultaneously less American. In one sense, then, they are casting a wider net for American culture, while also watering down their Americanness. Scholar Joachim K. Rennstich finds the global environment increasingly complex, explaining individuals and organizations [are] sponsoring and advancing innovation that results in the strengthening of the global layers of interactions (199). …

Teaching American Culture in a Global Society: Ray B. Browne's Legacy

In the course of his long and distinguishedcareer, Ray B. Browne published dozens of books, hundreds of articles, and thousands of book reviews. Curious about everything in the world around him, he epitomized the image of the scholar. Browne also excelled at teaching, and one of his favorite subjects was American culture; his penchants were popular culture of all types, detective fiction, Abraham Lincoln, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain. Not surprisingly, after establishing The Journal of Popular Culture in 1967, he founded this journal, The Journal of American Culture, in 1978. The articles that he and his advisory board members selected for publication helped to define the field of American culture studies and set the trajectory for academic inquiry in many a classroom. Browne read voraciously, and his myriad published book reviews on American culture topics helped to establish the parameters of the field of American culture studies: what was important and how to study it. Even after Browne and his wife Pat Browne retired from the day-to-day activity of publishing the journal, he continued on as book review editor, staying abreast of scholarship in the field and contributing to the intellectual discourse. Browne initiated the idea for this theme issue titled Teaching American Culture in a Global Society, believing it was time to revisit the ways in which the field was changing in the twenty-first century. He was interested, of course, in globalization and how an international consciousness affects national studies. He looked to America's and the Americas' role on the world stage and noted that attitudes toward cultural dominance had changed considerably since he founded The Journal of American Culture decades before. He also understood, as did Marshall McLuhan, that new media technologies influence not only distribution systems for information but people's expectations, values, and thinking patterns as well. Browne, who deeply loved books, acknowledged a growing preoccupation with the visual over the literary. Finally, he saw that cultural teaching and learning occur in many spheres, not just the classroom. All of these reasons led him to believe that the time was ripe for collecting from scholars all over the world essays exploring the state of teaching American culture in the twenty-first century, and he began the process with this theme issue. Unfortunately, Browne could not see this special issue through to its completion; he died at the age of eighty-seven on October 22, 2009. …

Critical Keywords in Early American Studies

Critical Keywords in Early American Studies Emily García (bio) and Duncan Faherty (bio) This compilation has its genesis in the American Studies Association’s 2010 conference theme, “Crisis, Chains, and Change: American Studies for the Twenty-first Century.” The theme inspired us to examine some of the critical keywords that will inform early Americanist scholarship in the near and distant futures. Since the publication ofRaymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), scholars have adapted his approach to define and delimit fields of investigation through metacritical analysis. The collection Keywords for American Cultural Studies (2007), edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, reinvigorated American studies (broadly construed) with just such an intervention. The continued attention to “keywords” as a measure of praxis has sparked a variety of dialogues and debates about the state of the field, specifically in regard to subject matter, methodology, pedagogy, research, the university, and the discipline. We sought to both expand and deepen this discussion by focusing on early American studies, inquiring how keywords function differently when framed not just by the spatial lens of “America” but also the temporal prefix “early.” A principal aim of Williams’s pathbreaking work was to consider the historically specific denotations of terms and unpack their evolving connotations over time. In this vein, we encouraged our panelists to think not only about the meanings of keywords during the periods we investigate but also about how they function in the critical temporalities we currently inhabit. In the following pages, Joanna Brooks (on “Colonialism”), Ed Cahill (on “Formalism”), Kathleen Donegan (on “Catastrophe”), Robert Fanuzzi (on “Relevance”), Lauren Klein (on “Archive”), and Bryce Traister (on “Nation”) individually and collectively prompt us to reconceptualize the meanings of key terms that shape our field and our methodologies. While some of these terms—Colonialism, Archive, and Nation—may [End Page 601] on the surface appear constitutive of the field and hence unchanging, they are here imagined in such a way as to animate our understanding of these perennially useful yet often controversial terms. The contributors do so by asking us to look back at our archives of the deep past, as Traister does by unearthing some ways in which the word nation was used in 1658; to look more closely at our (more contemporary) inherited critical archives, as Brooks does in tracing the initial appearances of the word colonialism in Americanist scholarship beginning in 1936; and to query what tomorrow will look like, as Klein does in ruminating on the complex relationship between digitalization, digital platforms, coding, and the futurity of archival work. Perhaps more than ever, we embrace the limitations of our existing critical vocabularies; our other keyword meditations—Formalism, Catastrophe, and Relevance—bring attention to this insufficient explanatory power. They do so by pointing us to the deep past as exemplified by forms and genres, as Cahill does in his exploration of patterns of rhetorical and representational practices; by diagnosing our approaches to ontology and epistemology, as Donegan does by positioning catastrophe to open up our understanding of the chaos zones so persistent in the early American cultural matrix; and by questioning the ways in which our work must and does speak to the contemporary moment and to the future of American studies, as Fanuzzi does by interrogating the complex synchronicities and disjunctures between our objects of study and the work that we do. We could not have predicted the cross-pollination between and among these terms but found it enormously fruitful for mapping our field imaginary. While it is impossible to index the lively conversation that followed the panel at ASA, we hope to extend and complicate that discussion by reproducing the observations that the panelists offered. Like Williams’s insistence on blank pages at the end of his Keywords and Burgett and Hendler’s eloquent invitation to “revise, reject, and respond to the entries that do—and do not—appear” in their volume (5), we intend the sketches that follow to contribute to an ongoing conversation about critical keywords in and for early American studies. Emily García Northeastern Illinois University Duncan Faherty Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center Keyword: Catastrophe Kathleen Donegan (bio) In the study...

Race, Imitation, and Forgetting in Benjamin Tompson’s New England Pastorals

Race has become an important focus of inquiry in early modern studies. What still remains less clear, however, is how and when we can establish theoretical connections between literature, ideas about race, and British colonial cultures of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Repeatedly, despite this early period's rich literary evidence of broad and flexible racial vocabularies and of deeply racialized thinking, scholars have still tended to categorize race as more modern idea--the product of eighteenth century (Hannaford 187-233) or of full development of slave trade (Chaplin). The centuries that saw beginnings of England's Atlantic empire are ironically less frequent choice for analysis of how colonialism inflected race (Loomba and Burton). To be sure, part of this gap probably reflects certain methodological uncertainty; Immanuel Wallerstein's world system analysis insisted on viewing emergence of capital as global phenomenon, but had little to say about literature or culture, for example (Loomba discusses these methodological issues). While insights borrowed from such disciplines as African American cultural studies and critical race theory have proven foundational to many discussions of race in Renaissance literature, their roots in analysis developed from study of United States may make them less useful when transferred to pre-Revolutionary existence of separate colonial cultures along Atlantic seaboard and in Caribbean (but see Hill). Nor is black-white binary that was foundational to critical race theory equally relevant across all these colonial cultures. While intermarriage between whites and blacks was criminalized in Virginia as early as 1680, Winthrop Jordan believed that by 1680, there were no more than a few hundred blacks in all of New England (66). One way of dosing gap of time and method between early modern texts and postcolonial readings as we seek to analyze how these texts transmit and codify race is to attempt more fully to read them within global flow of new world system, system manifesting itself through processes of circulation and return rather than only through one-way traffic from present to past, from metropolis to colonial periphery. The colonial poetry of Benjamin Tompson (1642-1714) takes its place in global flow of cultural goods as it turns to resources of classical literary genre to express its new circumstances of colonial location and relationship--in new world of Massachusetts (where he was born and educated), in bond between colonial subject and representatives of Crown, and, at its most troubled, in relationship between colonists and Indians. Tompson was in his early thirties during King Philip's War of 1675-76, last and most violent of New England's colonial Indian wars. His appeals to his mixed classical genres--elegy, pastoral, georgic--as he seeks to comprehend nature of New England life and traumatic fact of war that killed greater proportion of population than any other in American history speak to what Edward Said called the authority of recognizable cultural formations (12). Tompson's memorializations of New England present become culturally visible through literary resources of far more ancient past. My discussion of Tompson's attempts to produce classicized versions of war and of colonial society that succeeded it follows from Jill Lepore's The Name of War, which studies war in relation to language and literacy: what colonists wrote about it, how they defined themselves and their works in opposition to Spanish imperium in New World, how writing about war depicts contest for meaning in which only one set of adversaries had access to written language that was so fundamental to colonial justifications and characterizations of empire. Lepore believes that end of war led to drawing new, firmer boundaries between English and Indian people, between English and Indian land, and between what it meant to be 'English' and what it meant to be 'Indian' (xiii). …

To Make an Old Century New

To Make an Old Century New Tess Chakkalakal (bio) Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History. By John Ernest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 336 pages. $59.95 (cloth). $22.95 (paper). Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. By P. Gabrielle Foreman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. 280 pages. $75.00 (cloth). $25.00 (paper). Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. By Eric Gardner. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009. 258 pages. $50.00 (cloth). A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. By Stephen G. Hall. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 334 pages. $65.00 (cloth). $22.95 (paper). Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel. By Edlie L. Wong. New York: New York University Press, 2009. 337 pages. $75.00 (cloth). $24.00 (paper). A decade has passed since Elizabeth McHenry declared in this journal’s pages that “the more we know about the range of activities and strategies of resistance used by early black Americans as they worked toward a society that was both multiracial and equal increases the accuracy and sophistication of American cultural history.”1 McHenry’s 2002 book, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies, elaborates upon her earlier claim and now five new studies of nineteenth-century African American literature and history continue to broaden our knowledge of early black Americans and African American culture through the recovery of forgotten or neglected writings.2 All five, in different yet compatible ways, document and supplement the turn away from vernacular and oral forms of African American expression that were once central to the formation and study of African American culture. [End Page 1001] It was after all the “discovery” of black spirituals in the mid-nineteenth century, as Jon Cruz explains in Culture on the Margins (1999), “that helped to install the modern hermeneutical orientation toward cultural practices” (3). Although it was Frederick Douglass who first noted the importance of the spirituals to the formation of the black community, it was not until the twentieth century that they became the focus of cultural study. Renaming the form “sorrow songs” in his 1903 study The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B Du Bois situated them at the center of American history and culture. That claim would be echoed by the unnamed protagonist of James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, who devotes himself to recovering and transcribing the songs of rural southern blacks in his attempt to “catch the spirit of the Negro in his relatively primitive state.”3 Though developed during the nineteenth century as a response to the social and economic conditions of slavery, black religious music as an authentic form of African American culture was largely a twentieth-century phenomenon. Most notable is the work of Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates, which has illuminated both the meaning and significance of the black vernacular to African American literature and cultural production. Partially influenced by the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Baker and Gates’s theories of African American literature rely on oral forms, particularly music, to understand not only the meaning of what Gates calls “the black text,” but also the relationship between white and black forms of American culture. While relying on written texts, these critics helped to broaden the idea of literature to include vernacular forms of cultural expression rooted in slave experience. Hence, the formation of an African American literary canon that begins with spirituals, slave narratives, sermons, and folktales. That twentieth-century idea of the black vernacular has been slowly eclipsed in the twenty-first century by an emphasis on print culture, or what Wilson J. Moses calls “a literate tradition.”4 Focusing instead on a wide variety of forms of print culture that include not just novels, poems, and plays but also periodicals and legal cases, all five authors reviewed here share McHenry’s desire to dispel “the myth of the monolithic black community” by expanding our knowledge of early forms of black print culture (15). Recovering and...

Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870. Trish Loughran . New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Pp. xxv+537.

<i>Trish Loughran,</i> The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870<i>The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870</i>. Trish Loughran . New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Pp. xxv+537.

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction Eric L. Goldstein Over the last several years, the Bienniel Scholars’ Conference on American Jewish History, organized by the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS) and sponsored by the AJHS and a number of partner and host institutions, has become one of the leading forums for intense and fruitful examination of crucial historiographical issues in the study of American Jewish life and culture. As the official scholarly organ of the AJHS, American Jewish History has been pleased to bring some of the best papers presented at these bienniel conferences to its readers through special issues, including our June 2007 issue on regionalism and American Jewish history (based on the Charleston conference of 2006) and the March 2009 issue on “communalist” and “dispersionist” approaches to American Jewish history (a scholarly forum inspired by the keynote lecture of David A. Hollinger at the Los Angeles conference of 2008). In the current issue, we are pleased to again publish a selection of articles addressing the theme of a recent Scholar’s Conference, this time drawing on the 2010 New York conference’s theme of “American Jewish exceptionalism,” a question that has increasingly animated writers in our field in recent years and has begun to define the contours of debate among American Jewish historians, whatever their specialization. David Sorkin, a distinguished historian of German Jewry and of the Jewish Enlightenment in Europe more broadly, contributes the fresh perspective of a non-Americanist in his article comparing Jewish emancipation in Europe and America during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Drawing on the paradigm of European “port Jews”—Jews who were in the vanguard of Jewish modernization in the early modern period in Amsterdam, Bordeaux, London, and other locations known for their religious tolerance and vibrant economic life—Sorkin demonstrates that the Jews in colonial British North America and the early republic were not as unique in their attainment of political, religious, and economic freedoms, nor as unfamiliar with state restrictions on their rights, as scholars of the American Jewish experience have generally assumed. Sorkin’s essay is an eye-opening example of how common myths regarding American Jewish history can collapse when we push beyond the limits of scholarship defined by national borders and subject our assumptions to rigorous analysis within the broader framework of the modern Jewish experience. [End Page v] The second article in this issue is a wide-ranging historiographical essay by Tony Michels, the organizer of the 2010 conference. Michels approaches the question of American Jewish exceptionalism as a specialist in American Jewish history and an important revisionist voice in the field but, like Sorkin, also brings a comparative perspective to the discussion. Since Michels was not only trained broadly as a modern Jewish historian but has continually engaged transnational themes in his scholarship—particularly exploring the interlocking political and cultural worlds of eastern European and American Jews—he, too, argues compellingly that neither the challenges nor the opportunities that typified the experience of American Jews set them off completely from their counterparts across the Atlantic. Bringing the discussion into a more contemporary period, Michels argues that American Jews, particularly during the twentieth century, struggled with antisemitism far more than American Jewish historians have recognized, while European Jews—even those in eastern countries usually associated with anti-Jewish violence—were not constant victims of repression, as they have been characterized in much of the literature. While both Sorkin and Michels strongly agree that Jews in every geographical setting have demonstrated certain social and cultural particularities and have been shaped in meaningful ways by their distinct environments, their work powerfully challenges our tendency to overstate the singularity of the American Jewish experience. These essays also provide an excellent road map for scholars as the field of American Jewish history begins to receive more attention within the broader field of modern Jewish history and as more American Jewish historians begin to widen their perspectives to explore the origins of American Jews in, and connections of American Jews to, other parts of the world, trends that will undoubtedly broaden our understanding and further challenge our assumptions regarding American Jewish distinctiveness. The excitement with which I have completed...

Designing a writing intensive course with information literacy and critical thinking learning outcomes

PurposeThe paper aims to describe the process of redesigning the American Cultural Studies 499 course in order to integrate information literacy (IL) and critical thinking outcomes into specific assignments. Since this research and writing proficiency course at Western Washington University have traditionally been taught by a librarian with background in the discipline, the paper also considers the challenges in communication between librarians and discipline instructors about the concepts of IL and critical thinking.Design/methodology/approachReviews of the literature on IL across the curriculum and on partnerships between librarians and discipline instructors will be combined with an analysis of the structure of the 499 course and the relevance of various sets of learning outcomes to the course.FindingsWith more pressure on higher education to demonstrate the relevance and benefits of educational programs, this paper has the potential of enhancing communication among librarians and discipline instructors by considering the continuum between IL and critical thinking and the advantages of embedding IL or library research training into writing intensive courses.Originality/valueSeveral proponents of IL across the curriculum have considered the challenges in communicating the importance of IL to discipline course instructors who usually emphasize “critical thinking” rather than IL. Since this 499 course has always been taught by a librarian, this paper can view this issue from the perspective of a librarian who is also the discipline instructor for this writing proficiency course.

Estudos culturais latino-americanos : convergências, divergências e críticas

This paper presents and discusses some of the main results of the research about the most influential theoretical affiliation in the research of reception: the Latin American Cultural Studies. The main objective was to characterize this theoretical affiliation and to analyze transversally the contribution of some of its main exponents in order to understand the phenomenon of reception.