American Cultural Studies Research Articles

Carceral Lives Matter

Carceral Lives Matter Jeannine Marie DeLombard (bio) Jen Manion. Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Figures, appendices, notes, and index. $45.00. Austin Reed. The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict. Ed. Caleb Smith. New York: Random House, 2016. Figures, appendices, notes, and index. $30.00 (cloth); $18.00 (paper). Ava DuVernay’s 2016 Netflix documentary 13th, on the U.S. criminal justice system in the wake of the Thirteenth Amendment, is only the most recent example of the intensifying critical scrutiny of race and penality in both mainstream news sources and alternative media. In 2010, civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander published The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The 2012 New York Times bestseller recounts how the Reagan-era War on Drugs has gradually been institutionalized into “a new system of racialized social control.”1 The New Jim Crow may well have inspired black millennials to break ranks with their elders, as evidenced by protests holding 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton answerable for the devastating impact on communities of color of President Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill. (Both Clintons have issued apologies.) These protests attracted national attention to the Black Lives Matter movement, founded in response to George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting death of unarmed African American teenager, Trayvon Martin. As the news of Zimmerman’s acquittal spread in the summer of 2013, U.S. movie theaters were screening Fruitvale Station (2013). The Sundance- and Cannes Award-winning film opens and closes with smartphone footage of the 2009 killing of Oscar Grant—also unarmed, also African American—by a Bay Area Rapid Transit officer. Over the next three years, the tragic scene would be restaged over and over again in a seemingly endless string of viral videos documenting brutal police attacks on Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, and other black and brown citizens. Noting the widespread tendency to focus on male victims of racial profiling, the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) [End Page 33] launched the #SayHerName campaign in February 2015 to promote intersectional social justice by exposing violence by officials against women of color. With all of these events unfolding under what sociologist and minister Michael Eric Dyson in a new book calls The Black Presidency (2016), African American cultural criticism has again become mainstream. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ New York Times bestseller, Between the World and Me (2015), won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for General Non-Fiction. As the examples of Dyson and the AAPF suggest, those in the academy have not confined their voices to classrooms and peer-reviewed publications; with Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (2016), Princeton Department of Religion Professor Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., may represent a new cohort of post-Ferguson black public intellectuals. As Liberty’s Prisoners and The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict remind us, however, incarceration as racialized social control has been constitutive of American politics and culture from the very beginning. Aptly, Jen Manion locates her study of early American carceral culture in late eighteenth-century Philadelphia. Manion’s welcome contribution is an intersectional analysis that considers the interplay of race, condition, class, gender, national origin, and sexuality in the development of the penitentiary system. In the process, however, she covers ground that has already been well trodden by prison historians David Rothman, Billy G. Smith, Thomas Dumm, Michael Meranze, Rebecca McLennan, Leslie Patrick-Stamp, Jack D. Marrietta and G. S. Rowe, as well as literary scholars like Peter Okun, Jodi Schorb, Caleb Smith, and myself. As the familiar images adorning and illustrating the book indicate, Liberty’s Prisoners once again takes us from Walnut Street Gaol (1776) and Walnut Street Prison (1790), to Eastern State Penitentiary (1829) and Philadelphia’s House of Refuge (1828). U.S. prison history is typically structured by the tandem development of Pennsylvania’s “separate system” of solitary confinement at Eastern State and New York’s “congregate” system of silent group incarceration. Appropriately, then, Caleb Smith provides an insider view of the alternate “congregate” worlds...

Double Consciousness in Black and White

Double Consciousness in Black and White Robert Reid-Pharr (bio) At the panel “Callaloo: Literary and Cultural Studies,” Robert Reid-Pharr presented these remarks. It will come as no surprise when I say that we are in a moment of great change and crisis. To state the matter with some level of bluntness and sobriety, the US presidency has been taken by a right-wing nativist movement given new focus and energy by the cult of personality surrounding a real estate mogul and reality television star who openly and actively promises the harassment of Mexican and Central American immigrants, the increased racial and ethnic profiling of Arabs and Muslims, the continuation of the aggressive and often deadly policing of African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Latino communities, the dismantling of already anemic health care programs and policies, and the blunt reversal of the gains won by the women’s rights and feminist movements, particularly ready access to safe abortion. In this sense the United States has fallen rather depressingly in line with the anti-immigrant nativist political trends that have gripped Austria, Greece, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, among other places. We have, in fact, opted for a grotesquely American twist on the strong man politics and theatrics we saw during the years of Sylvio Berlusconi in Italy, grotesque in the sense that the rhetoric practiced and promised by the president-elect is and will be decidedly white supremacist while nonetheless maintaining a ridiculously ineffective cover of racial liberalism and color-blindness. The upshot is that, all the rhetoric of American fairness and progressivism notwithstanding, it is clear that though the recent US elections were about many things, at their center was a profound racial hostility and division. Indeed people of color overwhelmingly supported the president-elect’s opponent while a majority of whites, including majorities of middle-class, college-educated white men and women signed off on renewed white nativism. Our responsibility today, however, is to discuss the past and—more importantly—the future of the most influential journal of African American and African Diasporic literature and culture in the United States, Callaloo. We are specifically charged with the task of remarking the nature of the literary and cultural criticism that has appeared and will appear between the journal’s handsome covers. The matter that stalls us, however, the thing that steals and stills our breath is the fact that the character of our rhetorical—if not exactly our discursive—universe has changed. Our mouths are so full with the words “white” and “failure” that we find it nearly impossible to form proper sentences. My sense is that we have no choice then but to return to basics. Of course, the journal’s long history of representing and championing the varied cultures of the African Diaspora must be celebrated and continued. At the same time, I would suggest that the multi-valenced community loosely grouped under the label “Callaloo” should vigorously confront the illiberal and [End Page 153] anti-black ideologies that continue to molest and disable the peoples of Africa, Europe, and the Americas, no matter their race or ethnicity. Again, however, none of this is either surprising or novel. Where my comments do take a necessary, if not exactly new, turn is in my insistence that in our assessments of the frightening twist that has taken place in the politics and culture of the United States and elsewhere that we must radically expand what we take to be our natural purview. We must reconsider the most precious ideas developed within African American and African Diasporic cultural and literary studies, particularly, I would argue, double consciousness. Or to rush toward what I take to be the most significant of my claims, at least in the US context, we should build upon the insights of W. E. B. DuBois and his many students in order to name, critique, and ultimately dismantle what we might easily label white double consciousness. Within just the last few weeks, few months, few years we have seen the rather inglorious death of what one might think of a blank whiteness. In the polling booths of Wisconsin, Colorado, and Florida; on the angry streets...

The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico by Kelly S. McDonough

Reviewed by: The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico by Kelly S. McDonough Daniel Nemser McDonough, Kelly S. The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2014. 280 pp. ISBN: 978-08-1653-421-0. If Ángel Rama's La ciudad letrada (1984) secured the place of the intellectual in the field of Latin American literary and cultural studies, until recently indigenous intellectuals have been largely overlooked. This is partly a consequence of the enduring conceptual association of indigeneity with orality and in opposition to the written word. Yet the proliferation of Nahuatl texts in colonial Mexico indicates that this assumption could not be further from the truth. This is the point of departure for Kelly S. McDonough's fascinating study, which traces the political and cultural significance of Nahua intellectualism from the colonial period to the present day. The Learned Ones is divided into five main chapters, chronologically organized and each focused on the life and work of a different figure. Chapter 1 considers the Jesuit Antonio del Rincón, one of the few non-European priests to be ordained in sixteenth-century New Spain. Comparing Rincón's Nahuatl grammar to others written [End Page 211] by Spanish friars, McDonough foregrounds this native speaker's unique contribution to a categorical description of the language and, consequently, to the colonial project of evangelization. His grammar was the first to include phonological aspects like contrastive vowel length which, though nearly imperceptible to non-native speakers, could radically alter the meaning of phrases – an indigenous man might be told, for example, "to cut off his hands and drink, as opposed to washing his hands and bowing his head" before sitting down to a meal (54). Another colonial writer, the Tlaxcalan noble Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza, is the focus of chapter 2. His annals history recorded important events in the polity, above all the activities of the indigenous municipal council. By the seventeenth century, when Zapata wrote, the political and economic privileges that had been awarded to Tlaxcala for its early alliance with Cortés were coming under increasing pressure. Zapata's manuscript captures this context of crisis and the authorities' ultimately unsuccessful struggles to defend these special rights through public spectacles emphasizing their pre-Hispanic noble lineage, loyalty to the crown, and true conversion to Christianity. In chapter 3, McDonough transitions to the period following political independence in the nineteenth century. As an attorney and administrator versed in both colonial and national law, Faustino Galicia Chimalpopoca worked to defend indigenous lands from expropriation at a time when colonial protections had been dismantled under the formal equality of "citizenship." He also collected, transcribed, and translated numerous Nahuatl texts from the colonial period, from ecclesiastical manuals to historical annals. Although his political affiliation with the Second Empire made him controversial, McDonough insists on the importance of these curatorial efforts, without which many Nahuatl sources available today would have been lost. Chapter 4 considers one of the few published female Nahua writers, Luz Jiménez. Most famous for her work as a model for Diego Rivera, Jiménez also collaborated with anthropologists like Fernando Horcasitas, narrating traditional Nahua folktales as well as her testimonio of growing up in Milpa Alta during the Mexican Revolution. Importantly, McDonough centers Jiménez as an active participant and knowledge producer in her own right, rather than a "ready-to-order source for extraction" (133). Finally, in chapter 5, McDonough turns to the playwright and artist Ildefonso Maya Hernández, with whom she conducted a series of interviews before his death in 2011. His play Ixtlamatinij ("the learned ones," from which McDonough draws her title) stages the intimate conflicts wrought by cultural assimilation as well as the multiple forms of discrimination that Nahuatl-speakers have continued to face into the twenty-first century. Breaking up these main chapters are short personal narratives written in Nahuatl by some of the indigenous scholars with whom McDonough collaborated, including Refugio Nava Nava, Victoriano de la Cruz Cruz, and Sabina Cruz de la Cruz. The inclusion of these pieces is one example of the "decolonizing methodologies" that are at the heart of the project. Another is...

Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies eds. by Susan Antebi and Beth E. Jörgensen

Reviewed by: Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies eds. by Susan Antebi and Beth E. Jörgensen Benjamin Fraser Antebi, Susan, and Beth E. Jörgensen, eds. Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies. Albany: SUNY P, 2016. Pp. 290. ISBN 978-1-43845-967-7. EDITORIAL POLICY: Hispania publishes reviews of selected books and electronic media in the following categories: Pan-Hispanic/Luso-Brazilian Literary and Cultural Studies; Linguistics, Language, and Media; and Fiction and Film. Publishers and authors should submit their materials for possible selection to the Book/Media Review Editor, Domnita Dumitrescu, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, California State University, Los Angeles, 5151 State University Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90032. Submitted materials will not be returned to publishers or authors, even if they are not selected for review. Members of the AATSP who wish to be considered as reviewers should upload their information at mc.manuscriptcentral.com/hispan and send their CV to the Book/Media Review Editor at ddumitrescu@aatsp.org. Hispania will not accept unsolicited reviews and does not publish journal numbers, book notices, or reviews of works more than two years old. Due to the number of works that correspond to Hispania’s broad scope, not all requests to review specific items can be granted. We especially encourage, however, requests to review film and other media resources. An invitation to review does not guarantee publication. All reviews are evaluated by anonymous readers and publication decisions are based upon their comments and the discretion of the editors. A volume quite aware of its unique positioning, Libre Acceso is a major contribution to the interdisciplinary field of Latin American disability studies. The importance of this positioning cannot be understated. The collection succeeds by staging an “encounter between two complex and vigorously debated disciplines: Latin American literary, film and cultural studies, and disability studies” (9). Wonderfully, it performs a “decolonization of disability studies” that is quite necessary (19) and opens “an interdisciplinary and transregional dialogue on disability studies” (20). The division of the edited volume into four sections suggests a thematic coherence that, in all honesty, is at odds with the true originality of the individual chapters, each of which might otherwise stand alone in any number of top-tier journal publications. But then again, if these essays were scattered throughout the disciplinary landscape of the wider field of Hispanic studies—where disability studies perspectives still do not receive the attention they deserve—readers would be unlikely to find them. Libre Acceso is a powerful call to Hispanist scholars to explore disability studies themes, but given its publication in English, it is simultaneously a call to disability studies scholars to see that the ‘global turn’ called for by the likes of Stuart Murray and Clare Barker—among others—is well underway. The contributions that bookend the volume illustrate its unique position at the intersection of two fields. The first chapter after the introduction, “Blind Spot: Notes on Reading Blindness” is written by Lina Meruane, an acclaimed Chilean novelist who here self-reflexively considers her own approach to writing. The epilogue titled “#YoSoy” is written by Robert McRuer, a renowned disability studies scholar rooted in an English department who here revisits the book’s contents in light of an expanding Latin American and ultimately global perspective on disability. The chapters in-between take on cultural production from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru, but do so dialoguing with what often seems to be required reading for disability studies scholars: not only McRuer, but also Michel Bérubé, David Bolt, Thomas Couser, Lennard Davis, Nirmala Erevelles, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Rod Michalko, David T. Mitchell, Michael Oliver, Jasbir Puar, Ato Quayson, Carrie Sandahl, Tom Shakespeare, [End Page 137] Tobin Siebers, Sharon L. Snyder, Tanya Titchkosky and more. The contributions deftly navigate this disciplinary combination in their own way, incorporating the work of well-known and lesser-known names (Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Elena Poniatowska, Gabriela Brimmer, Ekiwah Adler-Beléndez, Roberto Bolaño, João Guimarães Rosa, Reinaldo Arenas, Antonio José Ponte, Miriam Alves, Mario Bellatin and Carmen Boullosa), and also a selection of recent...

Michael Denning, Noise Uprising : The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution

In Noise Uprising, Michael Denning shows why he is by now regarded as a giant in the fields of American studies and cultural studies. Denning recovers the sound and politics of a global “musical revolution” waged over just five or six years in the late 1920s. His central claim is that the early studio recordings of vernacular musicians from all over the world served as a vehicle, as well as a low-rumbling catalyst, for a political revolution: the global uprising against colonialism. Denning’s...

Maria's Rebellion: Gayl Jones's Mosquito and the Problem of Recognition

This essay proposes a hermeneutic of critical invisibility, borrowed from the politics of silence in African American and Latin American cultural studies, to offer a revisionary account of recognition: rather than a condition to which to aspire, the undocumented immigrant demonstrates what can be gained by remaining in the shadows of recognition. Using Mosquito 's attention to interethnic coalition building between African Americans and Latinos both in the U.S. and abroad, this paper proposes that we read the novel for what it might say about the failures, and not the promises, of recognition for these populations. In so doing, I extend the project of looking to African American literature as a necessary and valuable source for powerful and enduring representations of immigration, as well as critiques of the methods and objectives of immigrant rights movements.

Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America

Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America

When the Walls Came Down

When the Walls Came Down

Richard E. Norman and Race Filmmaking: Reprocessing and Digitization

Richard E. Norman and Race Filmmaking: Reprocessing and Digitization Dorothy Berry and Megan MacDonald In 2014, the Black Film Center/Archive received support from the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant program of the National Endowment for the Humanities to conduct the Richard E. Norman and Race Filmmaking: Reprocessing and Digitization project. This estimated two-year, three-pronged endeavor aims to reintegrate the dispersed papers of pioneering race film producer and distributor Richard E. Norman, produce and publish a comprehensive new finding aid to the collection, and digitize thousands of unique documents and other items in the collection for free public access online. The Norman Collection represents one of the greatest caches of material relating to the burgeoning study of early African American moviegoing culture and race films. Consisting of forty linear feet of historical materials, ranging from personal and business correspondence to censorship reports to production documentation to promotional posters, the Norman Collection provides a corpus for scholars seeking to explore the industry of independently produced, African American–themed films starring Black casts and exhibited to Black audiences that thrived from the late 1910s through the mid-1950s. In the 1910s, Norman, who had previously been working in niche “Home Talent” movies, became aware of independent, underground race films being screened at Black-operated theaters throughout the segregated South and Midwest. Though he was white, he turned to race films as his principal business enterprise and produced a series of successful all-Black feature films including The Green-Eyed Monster (1919), The Bull-Dogger (1921), The Crimson Skull (1922), and The Flying Ace (1926). The films highlighted African American action and romance in—at the time—almost fantasy settings. The Flying Ace, for example, followed the adventures of one Captain [End Page 253] Billy Stokes, an African American pilot in the US armed forces, a career that was entirely inaccessible to Black men until 1940. Norman was a meticulous record keeper in both his professional and personal life and the collection he left behind is remarkable as a near-complete record of the Norman Film Manufacturing Company, benefiting researchers of Norman specifically as well as historians of social migration, itinerant filmmaking, and the silent era race films. Beyond Norman’s substantial achievements, his well-documented relationships with the many performers, filmmakers, studios, and theater operators connected to the race circuit make this one of the most significant collections of a scarcely documented culture. In the July 2014 grant proposal to the NEH, highlighting support for the Norman Collection digitization and reprocessing project, film historian Matthew H. Bernstein writes, “It is impossible to overstate the importance of Norman’s papers.” Bernstein explains its value not only to film history, but to understanding “a distinct strain of black popular culture in the 20th century.” He continues, “Beyond the realm of race filmmaking, the Norman papers are the most illuminating archival resource in existence for reconstructing black film culture.” Megan MacDonald, the Richard E. Norman project archivist, has worked with African diasporic collections at Indiana University for nine years. Before joining the Black Film Center/Archive staff in 2015, she was an archivist for IU’s Liberian Collection working with one of the largest collections of Liberian materials in the United States. As part of this NEH-funded processing project, MacDonald has coordinated the reintegration of the Norman Collection, which had been distributed across two campus repositories following its donation by Norman’s son, Captain Richard Norman, in the 1980s. In this conversation from March 2016, MacDonald discusses the complications and discoveries that accompany a large scale archival access project. Dorothy Berry: Can you tell me your position at the Black Film Center/Archive? Megan MacDonald: Yes, I am the project archivist and processing archivist for the Richard E. Norman Collection. DB: Can you give a little background on what that collection entails? MM: Yes, he [Norman] was a filmmaker in the 1920s, late 1910s, making at first . . . itinerant movies, where he would take the same movie plot and go around from city to city and film it with a new cast, a local cast, and then play it there for the townspeople to see. Then he got into race films, which...

A Class Study of American Culture & Film through Problem-Based Learning

A Class Study of American Culture & Film through Problem-Based Learning

Telenovelas e a questão da feminilidade de classe

This article theoretically discusses the concept of social class to understand the construction of heteronormative femininity in studies on the social uses of telenovelas. Inspired by the work of Pierre Bordieu, Latin American cultural studies, and feminist theory, I argue for the centrality of the bodily hexis in conforming a classed femininity based on the incorporation of media capital by working-class women. The analysis reveals that the automatisms of schemes of classification are powerful mechanisms of reproduction of both gender and social injustice.

The Pan American Imagination: Contested Visions of the Hemisphere in Twentieth-Century LiteratureThe Geopoetics of ModernismThe Black Pacific Narrative: Geographic Imaginings of Race and Empire between the World Wars

The Pan American Imagination: Contested Visions of the Hemisphere in Twentieth-Century LiteratureThe Geopoetics of ModernismThe Black Pacific Narrative: Geographic Imaginings of Race and Empire between the World Wars

Articulation and Concordance: A Dialogue on Civil–Military Relations in Fiji

Articulation and Concordance: A Dialogue on Civil–Military Relations in Fiji

Cripping Consensus: Disability Studies at the Intersection

Last year's twenty-fifth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) offers an opportunity to reflect on its impact and legacy beyond public policy. One good indicator of its effect on cultural fields is the recent publication of Keywords in Disability Studies (2015), a multi-authored critical encyclopedia of major terms and issues. Modeled on Raymond Williams's Keywords (1976), this volume provides short summaries of themes, terms, and concepts central to disability studies. A cursory look at entries in that volume reveals that, in addition to predictable terms like illness, prosthetics, madness, and genetics, keywords that might as easily be found in an equivalent cultural studies volume also appear: minority, reproduction, citizenship, modernity, space. What differentiates such terms in Keywords in Disability Studies from analogous entries in, say, Keywords in American Cultural Studies (2007) is how central embodiment and cognitive difference are to the major terms of cultural studies generally.

Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler. Keywords for American Cultural Studies

Keywords for American Cultural Studies makes an attempt to approach the various terms and keywords included in it not as words with fixed meaning but rather as flexible linguistic constructs whose meanings change over time and within specific socio-historical contexts. In this respect the book is similar, according to the editors, Bruce Burgett and Glenn Handler, to Raymond Williams’ 1976 book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, which also proclaimed to be “an inquiry into a vocabu...

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir: A Biography by Michael Hicks (review)

The Tabernacle Choir: A Biography. By Michael Hicks. (Music in American Life.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. [xiii, 210 p. ISBN 9780252039089 (hardcover), $29.95; ISBN 9780252097065 (ebook), various.] Illustrations, bibliographic references, index.With this volume, academic interest in musical culture unquestionably signals its arrival. This is not to say that notable studies have not preceded this one. On contrary, Michael Hicks's own Mormonism and Music: A History (Urbana: Uni versity of Illinois Press, 1989) still stands as most sturdy and reliable resource on to date. Hicks's latest book, however, arrives at a time when cultural fascination with Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is at its highest ever. What journalists began calling Mormon moment peaked during Mitt Romney's last bid for White House, but seemingly unstoppable force of The Book of both on Broadway and in international venues, and of fan-favorite You - Tube sensations Lindsey Stirling and Alex Boye, suggests that a cultural rendezvous with Mormons continues strong. A fascination with this uniquely American religion hardly seems shocking; as The Taber nacle Choir: A Biography attests, it is nearly impossible to separate study of ism from study of American culture. Indeed, one demonstrable premise undergirding scholarship today is that to understand Mormons is in large part to begin to grasp what is America, and vice versa. Hicks's book intersects neatly with this burgeoning preoccupation with Mormonism, not only telling history of and anecdotes about famed Tabernacle Choir, but also using ensemble Richard Nixon famously dubbed America's choir to illuminate shifting topography of American cultural landscape.Hicks tells story of Tabernacle Choir chronologically in eight tightlywritten and eminently readable chapters. The first chapter, Books and Angels, explains how and why choral singing emerged in early Mormondom. Here Hicks places infancy of what would eventually become Tabernacle Choir at nexus of paradoxical dichotomy between spoken and written word. As a religion founded on new scripture, yet furthered by utterances of prophetic lead ers, place of spoken and written word in ism has often been contested. Rather than using this tension to theorize preoccupations with musical representation, Hicks patiently lays foundation for a more straightforward and simpler historical account that privileges more traditional storytelling practices. Hicks uses this mode of traditional historical writing to position this chapter within evolution of Choir from purveyor of local musical needs to international cultural ambassador for Church.The remaining chapters detail development of Choir until present day. Chapter 2 provides an interesting history of Salt Lake City Tabernacle, home to Choir for most of its life. Chapters 3 and 4 outline changes and challenges Choir faced while Church was growing out of polygamy and into greater acceptance in American values system. These two chapters span a remarkable period in Church's developing relationship with rest of American culture. Even more fascinating is how Choir helped push image of Church from that of backward outlier to what Hicks calls the putative spokespeople for mainstream U.S. Christendom in music (p. 73). It is this kind of rags-to-riches narrative that places Tabernacle Choir and its namesake Church squarely within that appreciable vein of Emersonian ideology considered so keenly American. It is also a story largely unknown, even among those familiar with history, and its appearance here makes for an exciting and enticing read.Leadership changes within Choir and increasing friction between that leadership and general leadership of Church occupy rest of chapters. …

From <em>Locus Classicus</em> to <em>Locus</em> Lumpen: Junot Díaz's “Aurora”

Research funds for this article were provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology through the research project “Critical History of Ethnic American Literature: An Intercultural Approach” (ref. FFI 2012–31250), directed by Prof. Jesus Benito Sanchez, and by the Regional Government of Castilla y Leon through the research Project “The Frontiers of Hospitality in Spanish and American Cultural Studies,” ref. SA342U14.

Dethroning the Deceitful Pork Chop: Rethinking African American Foodways from Slavery to Obama ed. by Jennifer Jensen Wallach, and: The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks by Toni Tipton-Martin

Reviewed by: Dethroning the Deceitful Pork Chop: Rethinking African American Foodways from Slavery to Obama ed. by Jennifer Jensen Wallach, and: The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks by Toni Tipton-Martin David A. Davis Ed. Jennifer Jensen Wallach. Dethroning the Deceitful Pork Chop: Rethinking African American Foodways from Slavery to Obama. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 2015. 295 pp. $27.95. Toni Tipton-Martin. The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks. Austin: U of Texas P, 2015. 264 pp. $45.00. Food, like literature, philosophy, music, dance, fashion, technology, and art, is a cultural product. Scholars have focused significant attention on most of these products, exploring how they reflect evolving ideologies, circumstances of time and place, and changes in taste and aesthetics. Food, however, has been mostly marginalized within academic discourse until the recent past. Lately, scholars have begun applying the theories and methods of cultural criticism to food and foodways. Two of the inherent challenges of food scholarship make it especially important to the study of African American life and culture. First, food production involves [End Page 166] overlapping issues of class, gender, and labor. By studying African American food, we can examine forms of work and experience that have been crucial to African American life that are otherwise rendered invisible. Second, the source materials for foodways studies come from recipes, dishes, cookbooks, advertisements, oral histories, community traditions, government policies, literature, and history. Analyzing these sources together yields a kaleidoscopic rendering of African American life with levels of nuance, detail, and specificity often lost in grand narratives. A number of works have blazed a trail for the study of African American food and foodways. Maurice Manring’s Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (1998) uses the trope of Aunt Jemima to explain America’s enduring fascination with the mammy figure, and Doris Witt’s Black Hunger: Soul Food and America (2004) examines the association of black women with food within the structures of social, political, and economic life in America. Several histories published in the past few years have explored African American foodways and documented its development in concert with social history. These include Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America (2008) by Frederick Douglass Opie; African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture (2008) edited by Anne Bower; High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America (2012) by Jessica Harris; Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine (2013) by Adrian Miller; and Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960 (2013) by Rebecca Sharpless. One of the best examples of the possibilities of cultural studies and African American foodways is Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (2006) by Psyche Williams-Forson. Her book combines traditional historiography, literary criticism, advertising history, art history, and media studies to interrogate the ways that chicken has been used as a signifier for blackness in America. Two new books contribute to this vibrant field of discourse, Dethroning the Deceitful Pork Chop: Rethinking African American Foodways from Slavery to Obama edited by Jennifer Jensen Wallach and The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks by Toni Tipton-Martin. The essays in Wallach’s collection expend on the growth of African American food scholarship. They use a variety of methodologies, “ranging from library science to literary close readings to spatial analysis to archival research to media studies and beyond,” and the variety of approaches used in the collection (xxii). As a whole, the collection explores the ways of studying African American foodways, offering a survey of the current state of a dynamic field that is coming into maturity. The book contains fifteen essays, and the range of its approaches to food studies is a great strength, but it is also the book’s weakness. Many of the essays in the collection open novel conversations about a topic, but the essays are too short to lead to a thorough conclusion. The first essay in the collection, for example, argues that the association of enslaved West Africans with rice production has obscured the role of cassava root in the diets...

Postfeminist (Dis)Entanglements: Transgression and Conformism in Contemporary Italian Teen Movies

According to film historian Giampiero Brunetta, the success of Luca Lucini’s Tre metri sopra il cielo (Three Steps Over Heaven, 2004) and Fabio Brizzi’s Notte prima degli esami (Night Before the Exams, 2006) is emblematic of the current “crisis” of Italian cinema. The premise of Brunetta’s negative comments are primarily aesthetics (bad script, bad direction), while other reviewers have blamed the same films for unrealistic portrayals of Italian teenagers, and expressed their concerns about the moral and social influence that such mis-representations might have on the young spectators. My essay begins from these negative accounts to suggest an alternative reading of contemporary Italian teen movies, by which I mean popular fictions that both represent teenagers and market teenage audiences. These movies constitute a “filone” (cycle) on the basis of similarities in plots and characters, narratives formulas, choice of actors and actresses, and commercial strategies. At the core of the successful cycle of teen films, I argue, there are the tropes of freedom and choice, and the concepts of agency and individualization. These ideas are fundamental to the construction of the neo-liberal subject, rather than some deviant example of social and moral behaviors, and thus worth of our attention. Furthermore, sexuality and the sexualization of both the male and the female bodies are central discourses to the film narratives and visual strategies, which inform a configuration of gender/sex system whose features have been widely discussed by scholars in British and American cultural and film studies, under the label of “postfeminism.” In this essay, films such as Federico Moccia’s Amore 14 (2009) will be taken as examples to suggest a taxonomy of postfeminist female characters, in their various declinations. I will contextualize contemporary Italian productions in relation to critical texts on postfeminism such as Angela McRobbie’s The Aftermath of Feminism, and studies on female-oriented cycles such as Hilary Radner on American girly films. My intention is to shed light on both the specificities of the Italian context and the continuities across national borders, in a globalized and transnational film industry.

West of Harlem: African American Writers and the Borderlands by Emily Lutenski

Reviewed by: West of Harlem: African American Writers and the Borderlands by Emily Lutenski Michael Nieto Garcia WEST OF HARLEM: African American Writers and the Borderlands. By Emily Lutenski. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2015. In West of Harlem, Emily Lutenski brings heretofore marginalized or erased black modernist experiences to the center. As the book’s subtitle suggests, there is an intimate connection between African American Writers and the Borderlands. Though the nearly exclusive focus on Harlem as the site of black modernist literary production and identity formation provides a useful center point from which to start, the center cannot hold if striving to do justice to the breadth and complexity of black lives. Indeed, any dominant narrative of blackness—in any era—will likewise occlude, suppress, and deny the great diversity of African American experience. In her rejection of “the idea that the West is anomalous in black history and experience” Lutenski joins the growing ranks of scholars [End Page 173] who would disrupt, challenge, and outright refuse monolithic racial and cultural narratives (25). Rather than anomalous, Lutenski argues, the West played a significant role in shaping the consciousness of the New Negro. What is more, “the borderlands West … was repurposed as … dreamscape in the years of the New Negro renaissance” (257). The dream was shared by Ralph Ellison, who argued that black freedom can be found in the American West (5–10). Here the West figures as frontier, as an escape from the black-white dialectic, and as liberating geographic space “beyond the North-South binary” of the black diaspora (12). In this West, the African American dream and the American Dream converge, rather than deferring the latter for the advantage of the former. To figure black freedom through geographic mobility, however, introduces a new challenge, and a not unproblematic one at that: “if American culture is to be maintained, new frontiers must be created” (9). Lutenski’s argument, it should be noted, is a cultural one. The book’s thesis, to paraphrase its promotional copy, is that borderlands cultures influenced the art of key figures of the Harlem Renaissance in surprising and important ways. In short, one would be mistaken to conceive of African American identity as a monoculture rather than a diverse culture characterized by cultural mestizaje. By recovering the ways in which “Mexico played a formative role in [Langston] Hughes’s transnational and antiracist vision” we can better see that “a politics and aesthetics long considered Pan-African” must also “be understood as multiethnic” (27). The same could be said of the politics and aesthetics of Richard Wright (who was also deeply influenced by sojourns in Mexico), as well as Jean Toomer (who arrived in Harlem from the West, and kept a home in New Mexico), Arna Bontempts (who set multiple works in Los Angeles, where he “spent his formative years”), and other major figures of the Harlem Renaissance—the last three of whom Lutenski devotes separate chapters to in the book (26). Lutenski’s masterful recovery of the West’s influence on the African American imaginary—the myths, metaphors, and folklore around which identities coalesce and form—gestures toward the work of Paul Gilroy, whose seminal notion of the Black Atlantic encouraged looking beyond national borders. In illuminating previously occluded cultural and intellectual influences, such projects run parallel to work done in borderland studies, as José David Saldívar notes in Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. In drawing from both Gilroy and Saldívar, Lutenski’s recovery project suggests the need—given the inextricable connections that bind them together—for greater engagement and conversation between ethnic studies fields. As a spatial studies project situated in the borderlands of the American West, Lutenski’s work engages deeply with the work of Latina scholars such as Mary Pat Brady and Norma Alarcón. It is no surprise, then, that in opposition to her opening gesture toward Gilroy and “constructs of the transnational,” Lutenski must insist that “region” cannot be elided—that place matters (12). Even a more abstract and metaphorical account of space theory must insist on the importance of place, as indicated by Mary Pat Brady’s emphasis on “the discursive and the spatial...