American Cultural Studies Research Articles

Reconciling Asian-American Studies: Debt, Indebtedness, and Obligation

Reconciling Asian-American Studies: Debt, Indebtedness, and Obligation Cathy J. Schlund-Vials (bio) Duong, Lan. 2012. Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. $79.50 hc. $27.95 sc. 264pp. Nguyen, Mimi Thi. 2012. The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. $84.95 hc. $23.95 sc. xvi + 276 pp. Ninh, erin Khuê. 2011. Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature. New York: New York University Press. $75.00 hc. $24.00 sc. vii + 207 pp. Etymologically drawn from the Latin term for “something owed” (debitum), “debt” strikes a decidedly familiar chord at the turn of the twenty-first century. Set alongside contemporary banking crises, financial meltdowns, and governmental bailouts, “debt” coheres with economically driven characterizations of cooperative culpability (particularly with regard to state regulation) and individual responsibility (e.g., subprime loans). Simultaneously, the condition of being in debt—“indebtedness”—can refer to monetary liability or assume a more personal register, signaling an affective obligation to another party or entity. This ancillary definition, in which pecuniary metaphor remains interchangeable with emotional bond, semantically coexists with “gratitude,” in which one is—by way of gift or favor—beholden to another. Notwithstanding divergent resonances and differential registers, “debt,” “indebtedness,” “gratitude,” and “obligation” are [End Page 182] relational terms that underscore associations between and among individuals and groups. This collective reading of “debt” fits the parameters of Asian-American studies as a now-established multidisciplinary field that was, from the outset, indebted to mid-century civil rights movements. Indeed, such movements vociferously and urgently emphasized the politicized obligation to reclaim and uncover histories of racialized oppression. The first generation of Asian Americanists recovered stories of immigration exclusion (for example, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act), racist incarceration (e.g., the Japanese-American internment), citizenship restriction (as exemplified by the 1922 naturalization case Ozawa v. United States), and political disenfranchisement. The field also owes—immediately and belatedly—a vexed debt to US foreign policy and shifts in immigration law. With regard to the former, twentieth-century American history lays bare longstanding engagements with and in Asia, emblematized by militarized interventions and occupations in the Philippines (1898–1946), Japan (1945–52), Korea (1950–53), and Southeast Asia (1959–75). In terms of the latter, the passage of the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act (which eschewed nation-state immigration quotas in favor of East-West hemispheric designations) and subsequent refugee acts (in 1975 and 1980 respectively) enabled the first en masse migration of Asian immigrants to the United States. These histories, which to varying degrees brought Asian-American studies into being, operate as identifiable anchors for three recently published monographs: erin Khuê Ninh’s Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature (2011), Lan Duong’s Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism (2012), and Mimi Thi Nguyen’s The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (2012). Accessible to multiple audiences (including undergraduates, graduate students, and specialists), each work makes a considerable and commendable contribution to the interdisciplinary fields of Asian-American literary studies, Southeast Asian–American studies, and American cultural studies. In so doing, these projects highlight not only where such fields have been but also evocatively highlight where they are and should be going. To be sure, integral to Ingratitude, Treacherous Subjects, and The Gift of Freedom is a nuanced consideration of debt, indebtedness, and obligation. These theoretical evaluations—rooted in heterogeneous archives and manifest in variegated reading practices—productively render visible a flexible, debt-driven analytic that re-visions and recalibrates racialized legacies of immigration and war. As the full title of Ninh’s monograph suggests, Ingratitude concentrates its affective and intellectual attention on the second-generation “debt-bound daughter” in Asian-American literature. Whereas Ingratitude focuses its narrative attention on the invested filial obligations between immigrant parents and their female children, Duong’s Treacherous Subjects evaluates—via film and literature—the indebted intersectional relationship between race, gender, and nation. Guided by contradictory characterizations of Vietnamese subjects (including “over here” [End Page 183] refugees and “over there” nationals) as “collaborators” and “traitors” during and after the American War in Vietnam, Treacherous Subjects provocatively recalibrates the...

Painting (But Not Naming) the War in Colombia

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsMaría Helena RuedaMaria Helena Rueda, Associate Professor of Spanish at Smith College, specializes in Latin American literature and culture since independence; violence and its meanings; Latin American film; and inter–American cultural studies. She is the author of Huellas de la violencia (2011), a study on Colombian narratives of violence.

Africa in Florida: Five Hundred Years of African Presence in the Sunshine State ed. by Amanda B. Carlson and Robin Poynor (review)

AFRICA IN FLORIDA: Five Hundred Years of African Presence in the Sunshine State. Edited by Amanda B. Carlson and Robin Poynor. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2014.Africa in Florida offers a fresh perspective on U.S. History, American Cultural Studies and scholarship about the African Diaspora. Originally based on a student-curated exhibit at the University of South Florida (2001), the work evolved in response to the erasure of the African and Native American presence in the 2013 celebration of 500 years of Spanish heritage to honor Ponce de Leon's landing on the Florida coast. The editors of this volume are Africanist art historians who emphasize spatial knowledge and visual images as the lens through which to grapple with established categories of knowledge that tend to separate European, African, and Native American experience while challenging the standard narrative that reduces the story of Africans in Florida to one of slavery in the deep south. Accordingly, the contributors offer a way of looking at Florida that goes beyond the nineteenth-century notion of Florida as untouched nature and the twentieth-century notion of Florida as a fantasy world. The editors contend that this approach allows for a more nuanced understanding of how and why individuals in Florida situate themselves in relation to Africa (as an idea or as place) and the importance of the African influence on personal, local, state, and national histories.A comprehensive volume that spans from African ethnicities in the colonial era to neo-Yoruba iconography in Florida today, the work is divided into five sections. Part I introduces Africa in Florida by way of geography, an overview of historical themes, and the work of visual artists Adrian Castro and Gordon Bleach who explore what it means to cross the Atlantic and re-imagine home as Africans in Diaspora. Part II, Seeking Freedom in and out of Florida: Slaves and Maroons, deals with the problem of slavery and freedom from various perspectives including the relationship between Florida's maroon communities and Seminole Indians and the migration of free blacks to Veracruz. One essay deals with the porous nature of the Florida-Georgia frontier for fugitive slaves seeking refuge as well as for smugglers and slave catchers engaged in the illegal slave trade. Part III examines the formation of new identities by considering Africanisms in African American cemeteries, cultural survivals in anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston's writings on black life, and the legacy of Mother Laura Adorkor Kofi, a female Garveyite. …

The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction by Haywood Ferreira, Rachel (review)

Haywood Ferreira, Rachel. Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction. Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 2011. 304 pp. In this book we witness Rachel Haywood Ferreira's strongest abilities as a scholar: her ample knowledge of diverse national literary traditions and texts, as she analyzes more than twenty-five novels and short stories from Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, as well as classics of American, English and German science fiction. She pays attention to the difficult paths of science fiction historiography, from the end of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th centuries. We also appreciate her serious discussions on the role of science in national development and its influence on literary history, the impact of Darwin's theories on literary production and the cultural imagination, and the tension between technophilia and technophobia, among other matters. Haywood Ferreira's engagement with these issues makes her study an important contribution, not only to Latin American science fiction studies, but also to Latin American cultural studies and to world science fiction. Working with what she calls the pre-space age, Haywood Ferreira makes a case for considering science fiction a global and emphasizes the need to insert Latin American science fiction production in it. On the other hand, she is keenly aware of the local circumstances that give the genre its Latin American flavor: in the case of science fiction, many of the works analyzed show a particular inclination to get involved with political issues through a satirical bend. Drawing on some previously published material, she divides her book into four chapters. first one, Displacement in Space and Time: Latin American Utopia and Dystopia, studies six 19th-century texts from countries with strong science fiction traditions--Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina-, asserting that readers will gain insight not only about the narrative motifs and themes (utopias, time travel, and the like) present in them, but also about the complex social and political forces that provided the cultural context that made it possible for these works to be published and read. As the author says: The length of this chapter reflects the relative importance of the utopia in early Latin American science fiction as well as the length of the works discussed (13). second chapter, The Impact of Darwinism: Civilization and Barbarism Meet Evolution and Devolution, engages first with a recognized Argentine writer of the times, Leopoldo Lugones, and then with a group of authors dealing with apocalyptic narratives and narratives of evolution as related to time. …

The Vitality of Discourse: Shifting Approaches in Latin American Cultural Studies

The Vitality of Discourse:Shifting Approaches in Latin American Cultural Studies Sarah Booker and Christine Martinez Throughout the latter part of the 20th century and into the 21st, Latin American nations have witnessed staggering change across social, political, and economic spheres. Significant trends include the widespread shift from authoritarian to democratic regimes, the urbanization and reconcentration of populations and the regional emergence onto a global marketplace. With changes in such force come associated dilemmas and shifts in thought: the reevaluation of past histories, the recentering and reaffirmations of national identities and the conceptual construction of models for future progress. The articles gathered in this section of Hispanófila analyze texts and cultural phenomena that span this period of time and discuss elements that are integral to current debates on literature, identity and the role of the intellectual in present-day Latin America. The contemporary conversations on history, literature, identity and progress in Latin America move beyond the conventional dichotomies of First World/Third World, “Same” and “Other,” or inclusion/exclusion that have dominated Latin American theoretical and cultural discourse. These are debates that emerge after the disappearance of cold-war mappings and as theories that once centered around such binaries lose their currency. The articles included in this volume should be considered in the context of such evolving approaches to literary and cultural discussion. As several of the articles evidence, the “Other” has been displaced or recentered. Rather than engaging in discourses that reflect the influence of an external or foreign “Other,” we are confronted with the encounters of discourses generated within nations. Such a critical approach that allows for the consideration of relations of power between multiple people groups and social strata within cities like Medellín or nations like Nicaragua, can be as seen in Luis Cano’s discussion of Jorge Franco Ramos’ novel Rosario Tijeras (1999) and José María Mantero’s discussion [End Page 137] of the memoir writings of Ernesto Cardenal. Cano explores the struggle by male characters to possess Rosario, Franco’s female protagonist, who, by extension, represents the struggle between various layers of society for appropriation of the city of Medellín. In Cano’s exploration of the feminization of violence in the novel, various types of violence embroil the figure of Rosario. The critic problematizes previous interpretations of Rosario as a feminine incarnation of power and agency by underlying a more insidious form of violence represented in the novel and embodied in her experience, a violence described as “the silence to which those dispossessed of the official language are condemned” (John B. Thompson qtd. in Cano). In mentioning the “official languages” controlled by hegemonic groups, a discussion about the recentering and re-formation of cultural hegemony also arises, as evidenced in Mantero’s study of the memoir writings of Ernesto Cardenal. Mantero evaluates the poet’s efforts as Minister of Culture under the Sandinista regime to redefine and redistribute culture among “el pueblo.” Referencing cultural theory from Alberto Moreiras’ Tercer espacio, Mantero describes Cardenal’s conception of “el pueblo” as a “third space” where the leadership of the Sandinistas and the subaltern of the pueblo could coincide. Mantero explores the complexities of Cardenal’s social and humanistic project. The critic shows how this notion of “pueblo” becomes manipulated as an object of power as it is increasingly identified with the Sandinista movement, resulting in the exclusion of other societal elements. Throughout this discussion, a clear example emerges of how revolution and political change – even that which aims for more equitable power distribution – can create new hegemonies and fringes within a nation. The continual rethinking of theoretical discourses has been necessary to keeping pace with the multitudinous shifts and changes experienced throughout the region. Such changes have occurred intranationally through revolutions, regime changes and population shifts, but have also occurred internationally as Latin American nations emerge onto the global sphere. Theoretical reconfigurations should not only consider Latin America as a geographical area or culture, but also as a “scene” within the movement of globalization, considered in terms of the market, diaspora, late capitalism and transnationality. We see the importance of transnational reimaginings in Junyoung Verónica Kim’s article that explores perceptions...

Lawrence Grossberg and Cultural Studies Today

Lawrence Grossberg is a scholar at the University of North Carolina (USA) and one of the most prominent exponents of American Cultural Studies, having worked with Stuart Hall, Richard Hoggart and James W. Carey. Author of Mediamaking: mass media and popular culture (with Charles Whitney and Ellen Wartella, Sage Publishers, 1998) and Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics, and America’s Future (Paradigm Publishers, 2005), in June, 2013, professor Grossberg has been the Keynote Speaker of the 22nd Annual Meeting of Compós, in Salvador, Brazil. In this interview, Lawrence Grossberg speaks of his influences and of contemporary challenges for a cultural studies perspective.
 
 Keywords
 Cultural Studies. Communication Theory.

Lawrence Grossberg and Cultural Studies Today

Lawrence Grossberg is a scholar at the University of North Carolina (USA) and one of the most prominent exponents of American Cultural Studies, having worked with Stuart Hall, Richard Hoggart and James W. Carey. Author of Mediamaking: mass media and popular culture (with Charles Whitney and Ellen Wartella, Sage Publishers, 1998) and Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics, and America’s Future (Paradigm Publishers, 2005), in June, 2013, professor Grossberg has been the Keynote Speaker of the 22nd Annual Meeting of Compós, in Salvador, Brazil. In this interview, Lawrence Grossberg speaks of his influences and of contemporary challenges for a cultural studies perspective.
 
 Keywords
 Cultural Studies. Communication Theory.

Finding purple America: the South and the future of American cultural studies

The new southern studies has had an uneasy relationship with both American studies and the old southern studies. In Finding Purple America , Jon Smith, one of the founders of the new movement, locates the source of that unease in the fundamentally antimodern fantasies of both older fields. The old southern studies tends to view modernity as a threat to a mystic southern essenceua dangerous outside force taking the form of everything from a obulldozer revolutiono to a onational project of forgettingo. Since the rise of the New Americanists, American studies has also imagined itself to be in a permanent crisis mode, seeking to affiliate the field and the national essence with youth countercultures that sixties leftists once imagined to be othe futureo. Such fantasies, Smith argues, have resulted in an old southern studies that cannot understand places like Birmingham or Atlanta (or cities at all) and an American studies that cannot understand red states. Most Americans live in neither a comforting, premodern Mayberry nor an exciting, postmodern Los Angeles but rather in what postcolonialists call oalternative modernitieso and ohybrid cultureso whose relationships to past and future, to stability and change, are complex and ambivalent. Looking at how othe Southo has played in global metropolitan pop culture since the nineties and at how southern popular and high culture alike have, in fact, repeatedly embraced urban modernity, Smith masterfully weaves together postcolonial theory, cultural studies, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and, surprisingly, marketing theory to open up the inconveniently in-between purple spaces and places that Americanist and southernist fantasies about owho we areo have so long sought to foreclose.

Seeing Black

Seeing Black Sarah Blackwood (bio) Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery. By Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013. 248 pages. $35.00 (cloth). Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum. By Bridget R. Cooks. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. 205 pages. $29.95 (paper). Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle. By Leigh Raiford. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 293 pages. $47.50 (cloth). $27.95 (paper). Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity. By Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 400 pages. $99.95 (cloth). $27.95 (paper). In 1969 the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted an exhibition titled “Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968.” The exhibition, composed mainly of documentary photographs, stirred controversy. Bringing what the New York Times called “sociology” into an art museum, the exhibition neglected to include any works of art by Harlem artists, and was organized and curated without any input from residents of the neighborhood just a handful of blocks north of the museum. This exhibition raised the ire of the black communities it excluded, who in turn argued that the museum seemed to mistake mere visual representation for social advocacy.1 I open this review of recent work on African Americans and visual culture with this particular exhibition, which the art historian Bridget R. Cooks examines in Exhibiting Blackness, because it distills a number of themes central to the flourishing field of African American visual culture studies. This field links questions about the relationships between photography, art, and racial identity, the place of black artists within and without the canon and white [End Page 927] artistic institutions, and the long history of visual representations of black individuals in the United States. The question of representation has long been vexed for people of African descent in the Americas. Indeed, representation by others and the capacity for self-representation have been at the heart of racial politics. White supremacy founded itself on a belief in the inability of people of color to give form to experience in a manner approaching art. In 1781, for example, Thomas Jefferson declared that “never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.”2 Shorn, by this logic, of this basic human faculty, African Americans were everywhere represented by others in images and narratives that tended to confirm their inhumanity. Not surprisingly, in the nineteenth century, the new and purportedly objective medium of photography reinforced the racial hierarchy—as, for example, in the infamous Louis Agassiz slave daguerreotypes. Jefferson was, of course, wrong about African capacities for representation beyond the utilitarian, as centuries of African American literature, music, and material culture attest. Scholarship over the past century has largely succeeded in bringing these achievements of people of color into full view, if not into the canon. Scholarship on African American participation in the plastic and visual arts, however, has only recently begun to have the same impact.3 The reasons for the delay in scholarly attention to black visual culture are multiple and intersecting. Traditional art historical methods, with their emphasis on artistic training, money, influence, the aesthetic as “common” (and unraced) sense, and mediating systems and institutions such as patronage and museums often exclude a priori the visual art forms most commonly produced (and consumed) by African Americans: craft, vernacular, and popular forms. The rise of what is called “visual culture studies” has been a boon to the study of African American visuality, given the flexibility of this approach.4 The methods of “visual culture” have enabled scholarly work like that under consideration here by attempting to do away with “high” and “low” forms of art, considering vernacular and popular media forms in addition to painting, drawing, and sculpture, and perhaps most importantly, moving the production of meaning away from the solitary artist toward an understanding of the meaning-making collaboration between producer, viewer, and object. Yet traditional art institutions and analytic practices remain...

Dear Mark Twain: Letters from His Readers

Dear Mark Twain: Letters from His Readers

Infrapolitics and the (Non)Subject: On Ethics, Politics, and Radical Alterity

Infrapolitics and the (Non)SubjectOn Ethics, Politics, and Radical Alterity Andrew Ascherl (bio) In his recent book, Latinamericanism after 9/11, John Beverley offers a pointed assessment of Alberto Moreiras’s contributions to Latin American cultural studies over the last decade. Beverley orients his commentary on Moreiras’s recent work by examining it as “both a critique but also a new form of Latinamericanism” that operates primarily as a critical practice bearing a strong resemblance to deconstruction (2011, 43). Beverley identifies Moreiras as part of a loosely-connected group of contemporary scholars who have come to represent a deconstructive tendency or intervention into Latin American cultural theory, and he makes a number of objections to the way in which this collective theoretical intervention has presented its various critical projects (which, for Beverley, are related primarily through their shared debt to deconstruction) as sympathetic to a generalized Leftist or emancipatory political [End Page 179] position. Acting as a force for immanent critique within Leftist political thought, such deconstructive interventions in Latin American cultural studies have concentrated their critical force on “certain forms of literary and literary-critical discourse associated with the nationalist or populist left in Latin America, or with positions of ‘solidarity’ with Latin America from abroad” (Beverley 2011, 44). This has resulted in a generalized suspicion of regional or national political forms like those that make up the recent “turn to the left” of several Latin American populist governments that some have called the marea rosada. According to Beverley, the misgivings deconstructive Latin Americanism has about this political shift to the left—and what he sees as an imperfect yet promising movement in Latin American politics—contradicts Moreiras’s “claim that the work of deconstruction prepares the ground for a ‘transformative’ politics” (Beverley 2011, 51). In other words, Beverley views this critical tendency as counterproductive to the development of the transformative politics for which Moreiras seems to indicate his support. For Beverley, it is precisely because of its melancholic attachment to the historical failures of emancipatory political projects in Latin America that deconstructive tendencies in Latin Americanist theory (like Moreiras’s recent work in particular) are unable to make good on the promise of adequately preparing the ground for political transformation. Rather, in its emphasis on “maintaining what Moreiras calls the ‘irruptive’ force of thought, as against the possibility of its commodification or reification,” the work of Moreiras and his fellow travelers in Latin Americanist deconstruction cannot shake off a nagging attachment to political failure, thus preventing these theorists from recognizing contemporary efforts to rebuild transformative political movements in Latin America (Beverly 2011, 53). While it was, once upon a time, the case that deconstruction performed the useful function of freeing Leftist political thought from the chains of the type of anachronistic theoretical frameworks that lead to catastrophe and defeat, nowadays, especially in the wake of the marea rosada, deconstruction itself seems out-of-date in its refusal to abandon a rigorous program of critique of the Left’s shortcomings. Beverley explains: To the extent that the defeat of the Left was due to the inadequate or outmoded character of its discourse—and in particular the inadequacy of that [End Page 180] discourse in the face of globalization and the collapse of communism—then deconstruction could (and did) serve as a place for revitalization. And to the extent that deconstruction is by definition a project of radical dedifferentiation, it could be said to be both in its theory and practice “anticipatory” in some sense of an egalitarian society. But with the resurgence of an actual political Left in Latin America, whatever its limitations might be, deconstruction can no longer command the strategic role it claimed for itself in the articulation of Latinamericanism, even as a critique of those limitations. (2011, 55) For Beverley, this inability to maintain itself as a prefigurative or anticipatory form of transformative politics means Moreiras’s deconstructive Latin Americanist theory has become primarily “a critique of political-cultural articulation as such,” and its immanent political orientation is something along the lines of a “procedural liberalism or ‘republicanism’ (with a lowercase r) in the mode of Hannah Arendt” (2011, 56). And, while Beverley stops short...

Orality and Politics in Latin America: Thresholds of Illiteracy

Research Article| July 01 2013 Orality and Politics in Latin America: Thresholds of Illiteracy Abraham Acosta Abraham Acosta University of Arizona, Tucson ABRAHAM ACOSTA is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Arizona, Tucson, specializing in modern Latin American literary and cultural analysis. His work has been published in Dispositio/n, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and Social Text. His current book project examines the politics of speech and orality and the question of cultural resistance in contemporary Latin America. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google CR: The New Centennial Review (2013) 13 (2): 203–222. https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.13.2.0203 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Abraham Acosta; Orality and Politics in Latin America: Thresholds of Illiteracy. CR: The New Centennial Review 1 July 2013; 13 (2): 203–222. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.13.2.0203 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressCR: The New Centennial Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © Michigan State University Board of Trustees2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Juventude, direito à cidade e cidadania cultural na periferia de São Paulo

The article deals with the experience of a collective culture in the eastern city of São Paulo, highlighting its political activities with other youth collectives working in the peripheries and how is the process of appropriation of urban space through artistic interventions. Program highlights the importance of VAI (Valuing the Cultural Initiatives) – the Municipal Culture in promoting the cultural activities produced by young people and the strengthening of the idea of the right to culture in the city. Latin American cultural studies theoretical support for the identification of the power politics of culturalperformances analyzed.

The American National State and the Early West by William H. Bergmann (review)

Reviewed by: The American National State and the Early West by William H. Bergmann Peter J. Kastor (bio) The American National State and the Early West. By William H. Bergmann. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. 288. $90.00 cloth) The western United States remains a place possessed by a striking contradiction. At one moment it is the West that is the greatest recipient of federal resources, including the creation of water and power systems, the economic spillover from the large military installations in the West, or management of large areas of land, including the national parks. And yet it is western residents who are among the most vocal critics of a powerful, intrusive federal government that threatens to interfere with individual opportunity. As William H. Bergmann shows, this relationship was there from the start, and it is a relationship that is more inevitable than coincidental. In The American National State and the Early West, Bergmann argues that western policy, in particular the struggle to replace Indian sovereignty with federal power in the Transappalachian West, would [End Page 447] transform the capacity of the federal government and the meaning of federalism itself. Focusing primarily on the 1790s and the first years of the nineteenth century, Bergmann describes how the military and economic demands of western governance forced the United States to dramatically expand its reach and its resources. The reasons for this change are jarringly clear: white settlers coveted Indian land and the federal leadership claimed the right to govern that land. In response, Indians established a resistance that waxed and waned as a result of the internal politics of native peoples, but one which nonetheless dealt the United States a series of devastating setbacks. It was only by reconceiving of federal governance—and creating a much larger army and civil administration for the West—that the United States was able to achieve its goals. This state of affairs was most abundantly clear in the Northwest Territory, where the federal government wielded direct authority. But it was also the case in Kentucky and Virginia, where state officials not only permitted a larger federal presence but demanded one in the interest of a cohesive regional military policy. Bergmann offers a detailed, yet clear, overview of the conflict, but his most original and revealing narrative concerns the economic ramifications of this military conflict. Drawing from numerous archival collections, Bergmann reconstructs the effort of the federal government to use trade as a means of regional development for whites and racial subjugation for Indians. Equally important, he shows how budding white entrepreneurs capitalized on these circumstances, whether they were establishing lucrative contracts as military contractors or joining an Indian trade that operated under federal supervision. The economy was never entirely dependent on the federal government, but federal resources provided vital revenue in the precarious economic circumstances of emerging settlements. And yet in the process of securing the West as a place for white settlement, the federal government unleashed the energies of white settlers who would make the first western states into models of participatory government and economic growth. Much of this analysis emerges from the close study of numerous [End Page 448] western locales, with conclusions based on the judicious reading of materials from numerous archival collections. And yet if the western locale becomes clear, the federal leadership remains fuzzy. Bergmann rarely explains how policymakers in the federal capitals of Philadelphia and Washington formulated their policy. It is a striking omission for a book that claims to engage the scholarship on statebuilding. What emerges instead is not necessarily a national story but rather a western one. White settlers would eventually create a narrative of how individual entrepreneurship released from government interference remade the West. Bergmann reveals not only the problems in that claim but also the process through which it came into being. Peter J. Kastor Peter J. Kastor is professor of history and American culture studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His most recent book, William Clark's World, was published in 2011 by the Yale University Press, and he is currently working on a book as well as a major digital project that will examine federal policymaking in the early American...

Frank Marshall Davis: The Fire and the Phoenix, A Critical Biography by Kathryn Waddell Takara, and; The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor by Paul Kengor (review)

Reviewed by: Frank Marshall Davis: The Fire and the Phoenix, A Critical Biography by Kathryn Waddell Takara, and; The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor by Paul Kengor John Edgar Tidwell Kathryn Waddell Takara. Frank Marshall Davis: The Fire and the Phoenix, A Critical Biography. Ka`a`awa: Pacific Raven, 2012. 216 pp. $19.95. Paul Kengor. The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor. New York: Mercury Ink/Simon & Schuster, 2012. 400 pp. $27.00. Arnold Rampersad, in an early 1990 essay, profoundly repositioned the study of African American biography when he rejected hagiography (“let us now praise great men”) and epic (“the subject succeeding against all odds”) as life writers’ goals, and urged instead an analysis of the subject’s life as social and historical critique and adapted psychological exploration. At about this same time, cultural critic Cary Nelson proposed new considerations of the studies variously called “literary archeology,” “foundational scholarship,” and “recovery efforts.” Nelson unerringly pointed to the past as having a shaping influence on the present. His theory enabled an understanding of the continuity of past and present as viewed through the freshness of our current modes of scholarship. In a sense, the revisionist perspectives of psychological critique and recovery efforts become the challenge confronting Kathryn Waddell Takara’s Frank Marshall Davis: The Fire and the Phoenix. Simply put, how does a biographer make Davis new and relevant again? Frank Marshall Davis (1905-1987) occupies a curious place in the history of American and African American literary history, cultural studies, and journalism. During the years 1935-1948, arguably his heyday, Davis found himself in the midst of volatile poetic and political discourses, focusing on yet another effort to resolve the conflict between vaunted American ideals and the general denial of rights and privileges to African Americans. In December 1948, he departed the truculent ferment of Chicago for the seemingly quiescent, racially tolerant U. S. territory of Hawaii. This relocation not only removed Davis from an epicenter of political turmoil on the mainland, but also deposited him into the dustbin of historical anonymity. The publication of The Fire and the Phoenix attempts the work of reclaiming and restoring him, as Professor Takara writes, to “the canon of literary Black history both as a representative African American writer of the Black Chicago Renaissance period, and as an outstanding editor, journalist, columnist, and poet.” The task of writing a critical biography of a man who was once the center of public acclaim but today remains shrouded in mystery to readers is indeed daunting. [End Page 535] Generally, the most significant challenge for a biographer is to define the ideas and expectations that make “critical” understood as an analytic goal. But Professor Takara eschews a more conventional, scholarly methodology for one privileging personal experience. She first met Davis in Hawaii in 1972, and enjoyed an acquaintanceship that lasted for fifteen years until his death in 1987. The Fire and the Phoenix, as she writes, “is my account of my friendship, research, and work with [him] through the years.” En route to unraveling, analyzing, and explicating this complicated man, Professor Takara establishes some very ambitious goals. Chief among them is an exploration of “the transformative processes of growth, corruption, and healing in [Davis] as he changed from an alienated black youth into a public figure, social critic, and writer in a racially divided society.” To do so, she enters the world of social psychology. There, however, she chooses not to buttress her argument with the most recent scholarship undergirding the fine studies of Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and Malcolm X. She leans primarily and often uncritically on Richard Bardolph’s 1959 monograph The Negro Vanguard, and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1967). A heuristic grounded in black psychology is commendable, but an analysis rooted in forty-five-year-old scholarship raises serious questions about its efficacy as an explanatory model. Take the assertion she makes that Davis suffered from victimization, defeatism, alienation, and isolation. An older model is less capable of demonstrating persuasively how Davis extricates himself from this psychological mire and develops a personal narrative of ascent...

Re-thinking American Exceptionalism

American exceptionalism has been an organizing concept in American literary and cultural studies for decades, but recent years have witnessed the proliferation of new approaches to this topic. After an introduction to the history of American exceptionalism, the essay traces the arguments of several key figures in this debate, especially Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, in order to provide an introduction to the utility of their claims for literary scholars.

Maurice Echeverría’s Labios: A Disenchanted Story about Lesbians in Guatemala’s Postwar Reality

Maurice Echeverría’s Labios: A Disenchanted Story about Lesbians in Guatemala’s Postwar Reality

Globality, Difference, and the International Turn in Ecocriticism

Comparative literature has always pursued literary studies in a transnational framework. But for much of its history it has been a “modest intellectual enterprise, fundamentally limited to Western Europe, and mostly revolving around the river Rhine (German philologists working on French literature). Not much more,” as Franco Moretti pithily sums it up (54). The rise of postcolonial theory in the wake of Edward Said's and Gayatri Spivak's influential work vastly expanded comparatist horizons, as did the attention to minority literatures that spread outward from the study of American literature and culture in the 1990s. In 1993 Charles Bernheimer's report to the American Comparative Literature Association, “Comparative Literature at the Turn of the Century,” criticized the elitist and exclusionary tenor of earlier reports on the state of the discipline by Harry Levin (1965) and Tom Greene (1975). Instead, it emphasized “tendencies in literary studies, toward a multicultural, global, and interdisciplinary curriculum” and called for an expansion from comparative literature's traditional focus on a mostly western European and North American canon of works to a truly global conception of Goethean Weltliteratur, for inclusion of previously marginalized minority literatures from around the world, and for connections to media studies, other humanities disciplines, and the social sciences (47).

CHRISTOPHER P. LOSS. Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the Twentieth Century.

First books traditionally present extensive research in primary sources on a relatively narrow topic. Christopher P. Loss's Between Citizens and the State breaks with that tradition. It offers a broad look at the relationship between higher education and the American state and citizens in the twentieth century that is based largely, though not exclusively, on secondary sources. Admirably ambitious in scope and engagingly written, it also at times generalizes too readily from insufficient evidence and attention to particulars. Loss argues that political leaders and educational elites worked together to create a partnership between higher education and the state over the course of the last century. While historians of science have recognized this, Loss's important contribution to the discussion is to focus not on the collaboration's goal of producing experts and expert knowledge but on the goal of creating democratic citizens. This subject—an important and underexplored one—offers Loss the opportunity to link two distinct schools of scholarship that rarely speak to each other: the work in American political development (or APD, as it is often called) and studies of American culture. Loss identifies American colleges and universities as “parastates” (p. 2), an awkward neologism of the APD school that mars this otherwise well-written work. A parastate is distinct from the state but used by it to “mete out federal authority at the local level” (p. 2), thus transmitting the intentions of the state to the populace without exciting the hostility toward government that is said to inhere in American culture. Higher education influenced the state as well, primarily through psychological expertise that promoted a “therapeutic ethos” (p. 7). Here, Loss again brings together two historical topics usually studied separately: the psychological profession and democratic citizenship. Loss argues that this therapeutic approach affected the ways in which the state, as well as colleges and universities, organized themselves and defined and promoted good citizenship. He concludes that, although student protest groups in the 1960s ridiculed psychological approaches, they also used them “in order to topple the despised adjustment regime” (p. 10).

Reinventing Walter Lippmann: Communication and Cultural Studies

In this essay I consider the unlikely proximity of Walter Lippmann and American cultural studies. I advance two arguments. First, I argue that the 1980s invention of Walter Lippmann as an anti-democrat played an important, constitutive role in the formulation and propagation of a communication-centric version of cultural studies. Second, I argue that the recent reinvention of Lippmann holds the potential to reanimate Carey's articulation of communication and cultural studies. For, as I demonstrate, Lippmann helps us rethink the articulation of expertise, democracy, and communication.