American Intellectuals Research Articles

Literary Culture in Cuba: Revolution, Nation-building, and the Book by Parvathi Kumaraswami, and Antoni Kapcia (review)

Reviewed by: Literary Culture in Cuba: Revolution, Nation-building, and the Book by Parvathi Kumaraswami, and Antoni Kapcia Ignacio López-Calvo Kumaraswami, Parvathi, and Antoni Kapcia. Literary Culture in Cuba: Revolution, Nation-building, and the Book. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2012. 265 pp. This book is a historical study of the role of literary culture (processes, institutions, policies, spaces, circuits) within the Cuban Revolution’s nation-rebuilding project that began in 1959. Instead of the traditional route of studying specific authors and works, the authors reach their conclusions through documentary research and the information gathered by interviewing over one hundred members of the Cuban literary world from 2004 through 2011. The introduction argues that the revalorization of literary culture had a basis in pre-1959 Cuba, with the literary groups around the magazines Orígenes and Ciclón, as well as the group Nuestro Tiempo. The first five chapters are devoted to the exploration of the program to create a literary culture among the masses, focusing on key actors, periods, and spaces. Kumaraswami and Kapcia claim that despite the tensions and economic crises, there is evidence of a sustained vision for the production, distribution, and consumption of literature since 1959. Chapter one provides the wider context of the evolution of the Cuban Revolution as a backdrop against which one can understand a parallel literary culture. Among several other landmark events, the authors mention Castro’s Palabras a los intelectuales speech in 1961; the Final Resolution of the notorious 1971 Congress on Education and Culture, where homosexuality was condemned and art was defined as a weapon of the Revolution; the Lunes and Padilla affairs; and the 1971-76 quinquenio gris. In their view, these events should not determine the interpretation of this period, as “cultural policy was not always defined” (22). We learn that the letters of protest against the treatment of Padilla sent by European and Latin American intellectuals were seen by the Cuban government as cultural imperialism, which was “slavishly European in their thinking” (28). Then, Kumaraswami and Kapcia mention the creation of important institutions, such as the Instituto Cubano de Artes e Industrias Cinematográficas, Casa de las Américas, Ministerio de Educación, Centro de Estudios Martianos, and Casas de Cultura. Other events discussed are the debates about cultural authority between the Nuestro Tiempo and Lunes groups, the camps for misfits (such as religious or homosexual youth) held by the infamous Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción, and the Mariel exodus that encouraged some intellectuals and artists (including Arenas) to leave Cuba. The second chapter articulates the theoretical approach of the book, which is based on cultural studies, Du Gay, Bourdieu, Appadurai, and Frow. It then proposes an alternative way to interpret Cuban literature and culture on the island since 1959 (the Cuban diaspora is excluded). According to the authors, despite the changing sociopolitical contexts, there has been an ideological continuum in the relationship between the individual and the state throughout the five decades of the Revolution. They also address the tension about the prioritization of political or aesthetic value. The chapter presents an overview of existing scholarship on Cuban literature since 1959, dismissing most of it as inadequate and simplistic. In their [End Page 657] view, it tends to focus either only on the moments of extreme conflict or on a supposedly all-powerful monolithic state, with the goal of showing evidence of the subjugation of art by socialist ideology. Incidentally, if the authors wanted to combat this purported stereotype, perhaps they should have chosen a different photo for the cover, where one can see a large photo of Castro at the entrance of a second-hand bookstore. They maintain that other books tend to assess Cuban literature using external paradigms (thus ignoring Cuban exceptionalism) and focusing on selected individual writers or on genres. Then, Kumaraswami and Kapcia sarcastically decry the “selective memory” of memoirs of exile that forget any sort of commitment to the Cuban system or the opportunities brought by the Revolution, to obey foreign publishers’ demand for “readable narratives that reinforce the horrors of the Caribbean gulag” (40, 41). The following three chapters analyze the evolution of Cuban literary culture from...

Becoming Part of the Moving Story: Jews on the Latin American Screen

Jews were among the pioneers of film and television in most of Latin America. The historiography of cinema, however, does not usually mention the ethnicity or religion of the filmmakers since Latin American intellectuals tend to reject ethnicity as an important analytical category, unless it relates to indigenous groups or people of African descent. This approach is shared by many intellectuals identified with specific ethnic backgrounds, such as Jewish Latin Americans, Arab Latin Americans, and Asian Latin Americans.Most of the meager information about Jewish contributions to filmmaking in the past can be found in the publications of community institutions, which endeavor to highlight Jewish contributions to various facets of life in Latin America. They are also available in personal memoirs and on websites. Moreover, several authors writing about the Jewish achievement in Latin America have not considered cinema as a worthy enough activity to be mentioned among their accomplishments. In his 1960s book on the Jews of Argentina, for example, Jose Liberman recounted the history of Jewish agricultural settlement in the country, discussed the establishment of community institutions, and added a long list of Jews active in politics, the economy, and culture, 1 but he did not mention Jews active in popular culture, such as movies, television, music, or sports. More than forty years later, Ricardo Feierstein, in his history of Argentinian Jews, devoted only five pages out of 459 to mentioning Jews who were prominent in these fields.2 In both cases, it is impossible to know whether the characterization of certain people as Jewish relied on research in archives or was merely based on pinpointing names that sounded Jewish or simply on personal acquaintance.In the past decade methodological and theoretical discussions, however, have encouraged new studies of Jewish Latin American experiences.3 Recent studies are less focused on political aspects, giving more weight to cultural and social facets. Scholars nowadays are less concerned with Jews as victims of anti- Semitism, xenophobia, or racism and more with their place and role as integral parts of society at large. Research is no longer based so much on communal and institutional sources as on testimonies produced by nonaffiliated ethnics, focusing on history from below and on oral testimonies rather than on official stories. Many authors currently favor comparative perspectives, both across ethnic divides within the nation and from a transnational viewpoint regarding the Diaspora links to its real or imagined homeland.4 The present issue of Jewish Film & New Media reflects the vitality and innovativeness of Jewish Latin American studies.When it comes to the bibliography on Latin American cinema, the challenges are no less significant. Since Jews are often identified with the hegemonic white population, the research focused on the Jewish contribution to film and television, or on the representation of Jewish experiences in movies, has been minimal or conspicuously absent until the rise of multicultural perceptions in the late twentieth century. Thus a dictionary of filmmakers published in the late 1990s includes four hundred entries for Latin American directors without mentioning their ethnic identity or religious faith. On the other hand, the dictionary includes special chapters on foreign directors who visited the Latin American continent, and on exiled Spanish filmmakers who found refuge in Argentina and Mexico following the victory of the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39).5 Similarly, a book of interviews with seventy well-known filmmakers from all over Latin America casually mentioned the Jewishness of only one of them, and ignored that of at least one other.6Moreover, before the upsurge of democratization in the eighties, and the integration of national economies into globalized markets from the early 1990s onward, very few films featured Jewish characters. …

The Influence of Washington’s Farewell Address on the American Intellectual Property Debate in the Late 19th Century

A content analysis of the Congressional Record and U.S. diplomatic correspondences relating to the negotiation of the Paris and Berne Conventions in the late 19th century reveals that American officials advanced business interests in accordance with Washington’s Farewell Address ahead of the constitutional mandate to promote the arts and sciences.Une analyse de contenu du Congressional Record et de la correspondance de la diplomatie américaine concernant la négociation des Conventions de Paris et de Berne à la fin du XIXe siècle révèle que les haut responsables américains ont fait passer les intérêts commerciaux des États-Unis, conformément au discours d’adieu de Washington, devant le mandat constitutionnel de promouvoir les arts et les sciences.

Latin American Perspectives

In the mid-1960s a new forum for progressive work in Latin American studies was born in Southern California. It was initiated by junior faculty and graduate students who questioned the mainstream emphasis on institutional stability in modern capitalism. Negative effects of the market economy in Latin America such as social inequality, political repression, and external dependence, they protested, were absent from the agenda of mainstream research. Too often, concerns central to Latin American intellectuals were sidelined by traditional U.S. journals. To counter this tendency, the Southern California progressive Latin Americanists, many of them educated at the prestigious but rather conservative Stanford University, launched initiatives such as Union of Radical Latin Americanists (URLA), the Los Angeles Group for Latin American Solidarity (LAGLAS), Non-Intervention in Chile (NICH), and the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA). In 1974 they converged in a new academic journal, Latin American Perspectives (LAP). During its founding meeting in Laguna Beach, LAP was conceived to be on the cutting edge of studies on capitalism, socialism, and imperialism and in tune with popular struggles and debates within the Latin American left. The founders’ intention was to unite intellectuals North and South and be open to new thinking and debates. They adopted a participatory editorial culture accompanied by a critique of both mainstream positivism and the orthodox Marxist politicization of social research while seeking theoretical innovations and concrete analyses of capitalism. During four decades, debates appeared in the journal’s pages, initially with pioneering issues on dependency, Cuban socialism, gender, democratic class struggle, and imperialism. Later, when

Decolonising the ‘epistemic decolonial turn’ in women's fiction: Tsitsi Dangarembga's She No Longer Weeps (1987) and Federico Garcia Lorca's Dona Rosita the Spinister (2008)

The aim of this article is to participate in the debate on the ‘epistemic decolonial turn’ that is popularised in Latin America, and has found succour in some African universities despite the fact that its origin is in Western Europe. The article does not intend to be exhaustive of all the orphic dimensions to this debate; rather, we intent to raise questions on the suitability and timing of the introduction of this debate in Africa and Latin America because we think that this debate could very well be another form of intellectual structural adjustment programme being imposed, time without end on Africa and Latin America by western and North American intellectuals. We are aware that we are implicated in furthering the debate by our very participation in it. However, the article intents to reveal the aporetic narratives within the debate as conducted in Africa and Latin America. The article uses the works of Tsitsi Dangarembga's She No Longer Weeps (1987) and Federico Garcia Lorca's Dona Rosita the Spinister (2008). If anyone protests that our primary sources are few, we are the first to answer in the affirmative, but argue humbly that we do not need 100 novels to show that a theoretical ‘turn’ such as is implied in the auspicious phrase ‘epistemic decolonial turn’ is an ideological position, in transition, not finished, unsettled, work-in-progress that is bound to produce narratives that are more fractured than the stabilised ‘turn’ implied in the term. Multiple turns can be imagined and authorised from unexpected cultural sites when ‘decolonial turns’ are conceptualised as self-reflexive. A reading of Dangarembga's She No Longer Weeps (1987) set in Zimbabwe and Lorca's Dona Rosita the Spinister (2008) – another dramatic text but – set in Granada requires that the ‘epistemic decolonial turn’ be ‘decolonised’ because the concept's excessive privileging of formerly colonised men's theoretical voices threatens to occlude and then generalise on the voices of women in the Third and First worlds by projecting these voices as ideologically even. The article argues that the coloniality of power can inhabit the structures of feeling of the very intellectuals seeking to further the debate, about which the ‘decolonial turn’ is meant to be effected in the name of ordinary people. To argue in this manner is not to succumb to reckless despair; it is to caution against reckless theoretical hope overzealously displayed by some African academics who uncreatively import the debate into Africa, forcing Africans to fight an intellectual war which may not – after all – be a war that Africans have chosen for themselves.

The Cultural Politics of the Brushstroke

In both modern and premodern critical writing, both “East and West,” the brushstroke eventually came to be characterized as a vehicle of personal expression in defiance of the stifling rules of naturalistic representation. By the mid-twentieth century, the image of the bohemian master flinging paint would have been familiar to both Chinese and European art lovers. It does not follow, however, that the seductive rhetoric of the brushstroke has been deconstructed or even understood, as demonstrated by the cultural politics of the brushstroke in debates between and among European, American, and Chinese intellectuals over a period of four centuries.

Esculpindo a "Nova Mulher Negra": feminilidade e respeitabilidade nos escritos de algumas representantes da raça nos EUA(1895-1904)

Na virada do século XIX, intelectuais afro-americanas assumiram a missão de construir uma nova face pública para sua raça. Com trajetórias excepcionais em relação à maioria da população negra, "mulheres da raça", como Anna Cooper e Fannie Williams, deixaram escritos que apontavam o melhor caminho para preparar as "massas negras" para o mundo livre. Devido ao poder econômico, à formação intelectual e à luta antiracista, elas personificavam a imagem da "nova mulher negra". O objetivo deste artigo é discutir quem era e o que se esperava dessa personagem, construída no pós-abolição dos EUA.

Ensaios latino-americanos: "caráter nacional" e construção de estereótipos

O artigo se refere à questão do "caráter nacional" amplamente discutida por intelectuais latino-americanos entre as décadas de 1930-50. Procuro analisar ensaios produzidos por autores que, nesse período, demonstraram grande interesse pelo tema. Busco identificar em suas obras aspectos que contribuíram para a formação de mitos e tipos nacionais estereotipados. Essas obras tiveram grande repercussão nacional e continental na época em que foram publicados e até hoje os traços do caráter nacional apresentados nos ensaios que analiso continuam sendo mencionados como se tivessem base científica. Tento mostrar os preconceitos resultantes dessas caracterizações, que continuam vivas nos imaginários sociais, servindo de justificativa para formas diversas de intolerância.

Jonathan Beecher Field, Errands into the Metropolis: New England Dissidents in Revolutionary LondonErrands into the Metropolis: New England Dissidents in Revolutionary London. Jonathan Beecher Field. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2009. Pp. xiii+154.

<i>Jonathan Beecher Field</i>, Errands into the Metropolis: New England Dissidents in Revolutionary London<i>Errands into the Metropolis: New England Dissidents in Revolutionary London</i>. Jonathan Beecher Field. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2009. Pp. xiii+154.

Does the US Patent System Need a Patent Small Claims Proceeding?

Patent litigation is expensive. The primary motivation for the creation of a patent small claims proceeding is to make enforcement more affordable. However, in the twenty or so years since the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA) first endorsed the idea of a small claims patent court through Resolution 401‐4, the patent litigation landscape has drastically changed. Although patent litigation costs are still high, the equities have shifted. The marketplace for patents has developed, providing more options than previously existed to monetize and assert patents. However, the cost of patent defense has not gone down, and small companies cannot afford to bring meritorious defenses. As a result, it is the high costs of defense that now presents a pressing concern. We do not believe that a small claims patent court is the answer. Nonetheless, if a small claims patent court is to be adopted, we include some principles below that should help inform such a court’s creation.This paper was submitted as a comment to the USPTO's request for comment on a small claims proceeding in March 2013.

History Education for Sectional Reconciliation and the Emergence of Racial Nationalism : Revisiting the Civil War and Reconstruction in the Late Nineteenth Century and Early Twentieth-Century History Schoolbooks

Liberalism and nationalism surged together in revolutionary France creating civic nationalism. However, as the 19th century wore on, civic nationalism increasingly declined. In European nations, nationalism became a conservative ideology to support the unequal system, mobilize people for imperialist causes, and combat socialism. It also idealized a racially homogeneous community and reproduced ethnic and racial hierarchies.<BR> As early history schoolbooks represented, in the era of nation-building, American intellectuals also tried to construct civic nationalism. However, as the Civil War ended slavery and made liberty universal, the need of reconciling whites in two regions facilitated racial nationalism by forgetting the cause of the War and stressing the common racial traits among whites.<BR> In fact, racial nationalism in schoolbooks already appeared in prewar textbooks and its narrative was formulated in as early as the 1870s. However, it does not mean that liberalism passed away even before the 1900s. These schoolbooks represented that it was alive into the 1900s, but was greatly constrained by the reconciliatory nationalism and racism.

Righteous Violence: Revolution, Slavery, and the American Renaissance (review)

Righteous Violence: Revolution, Slavery, and American Renaissance. By Larry J. Reynolds. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. Pp. 256. Paper, $24.95.)Reviewed by Andre M. FlecheLarry J. Reynolds, Distinguished Professor of English at Texas A&M University, has produced a body of exciting interdisciplinary and globally oriented work on intellectual history of mid nineteenth century. His first book, European Revolutions and American Literary Renaissance (New Haven, CT, 1988), was among earliest studies to examine impact that European of 1848 had on American intellectuals. In his newest volume, Righteous Violence, Reynolds develops themes related to his earlier work, tracing ways in which seven writers of American Renaissance grappled with moral and ethical problems posed by many instances of politically motivated violence that troubled world of mid-1800s. In seven loosely connected essays, some versions of which previously appeared elsewhere, Reynolds explores ways in which some of America's best-known writers struggled to find answers to one important question: Under what circumstances is it morally right to kill another human being? (1). Reynolds argues that each author resolved problem in different ways, but that all wrestled with it, thereby imparting much of moral urgency to literary movement that was subsequently termed the American Renaissance.Reynolds begins his study with observation that violence permeated nineteenth century (1). Much of conflict, he argues, was driven by growing tension between desire for human liberty and existence of human oppression and slavery. The American Revolution, French Revolution, Haitian Revolution, of 1848, American Civil War, and struggles of early labor movement, Reynolds contends, all suggested to contemporaries that violence might be employed in a righteous struggle for human freedom. According to Reynolds, many of authors he studied dwelt especially on figure of John Brown as they responded to ethical dilemmas inherent in current events. For some writers, figures like Brown, and rebellions, revolts, riots, insurrections, and revolutions they fomented, represented principled heroism, while other authors remained more ambivalent about those who would kill so that good might be done (x).Reynolds, in his first and most provocative chapter, argues that Margaret Fuller's dispatches from Italy during of 1848 and 1849 may have inspired a generation of abolitionists to abandon their pacifist principles and embrace violence in name of freedom. Fuller strongly supported struggle of Italian revolutionaries to establish a republic in Rome, and, in her dispatches, depicted such insurrectionists as Giuseppe Garibaldi as heroic and romantic men-of-action. She even went so far as to countenance brutal assassination by stabbing of prominent reactionary, Count Pellegrino Rossi. Fuller's writings, Reynolds contends, had a strong impact on such militant abolitionists as Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Franklin Sanborn. In a later chapter, Reynolds demonstrates that Fuller's work may also have inspired Louisa May Alcott, whose novel Moods (1865) prominently featured a character who left America to fight alongside Garibaldi in Rome.The other authors in Reynolds's study did not embrace violence so quickly or easily. For Frederick Douglass, Reynolds argues in his second chapter, decision to abandon pacifism proved difficult. Douglass understood human relationships slavery could engender, but also experienced brutal repression institution entailed. Reynolds demonstrates, through a close reading of Douglass's work, how famous abolitionist gradually abandoned his pacifist principles over course of 1840s and 1850s, finally concluding in his story The Heroic Slave (1853) that slave revolt, like political revolution, could be justified in name of human freedom. …

ALFONSO REYES EN SUR AMÉRICA DIPLOMACIA Y CAMPO INTELECTUAL EN AMÉRICA LATINA, 1927-1939

Este trabajo analiza la evolución del campo intelectual latinoamericano entre 1927 y 1939, a partir del accionar diplomático e intelectual del mexicano Alfonso Reyes, uno de los más importantes intelectuales hispanoamericanos del siglo XX. La metodología que se utiliza tiene en cuenta algunos de los aspectos señalados por Pierre Bourdieu y otros investigadores como centrales en la conformación de un campo intelectual. El trabajo parte de la tesis según la cual en América Latina se puede hablar de un campo intelectual a partir de la transición del siglo XIX al XX, pero especialmente se estudian y evalúan algunas situaciones y circunstancias de carácter intelectual y diplomático que permitieron a Reyes dinamizar la cultura continental durante el período en estudio.

JAPANESE AMERICAN WARTIME EXPERIENCE, TAMOTSU SHIBUTANI AND METHODOLOGICAL INNOVATION, 1942–1978

A case study of how wartime internment reverberated in the life and work of Japanese American intellectuals, this essay discusses the career and interests of Tamotsu Shibutani, a sociologist who began his training as part of Dorothy Swaine Thomas' Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS). Though recent scholarship has noted some of the ethical problems that attended the use of Japanese American participant observers during the war, this essay concentrates instead on how interned intellectuals responded to their double role of both researcher (and intellectual) and object of study. I argue that in the case of Shibutani, his circumstances and identity shaped his scholarship, both as an academic endeavor and a political project. By tracking Shibutani's postwar scholarly activities, I show that his wartime experiences--as an internee, military officer, and participant-observer--reverberated in his sociological publications long after the war's end.

Reading Professor Obama: The Syllabus on 'Current Issues in Racism and the Law'

“Reading Professor Obama” mines Barack Obama’s syllabus on “Current Issues in Racism and the Law” for evidence of his beliefs about race, law, and jurisprudence. The syllabus for the 1994 seminar at the University of Chicago, which provides the reading assignments and structure for the course, has been available on the New York Times website since July 2008. Other than a few responses solicited by the New York Times when it published the syllabus, however, there has been little attention to the material Obama assigned or to what it suggests about Obama’s approach to the law and racism.The readings begin by discussing the malleability of racial categories and progress to cases from the nineteenth century on Native Americans and on slavery. The second day’s readings shifted to the Reconstruction era and changes in the Constitution and statutory law, as well as the rise of the “Jim Crow” system of segregation and the response of African American intellectuals. The third class covered the Civil Rights revolution and retrenchment and included reading from such diverse figures as Robert Bork, Lino Graglia, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X. The fourth class, “Where Do We Go From Here?” addressed some of the enduring issues of inequality facing our nation, the fragility of the African American middle class, continuing racism against African Americans, and a concluding plea from Cornel West for more understanding. After the initial four class meetings, student groups made presentations. The syllabus has suggested topics for the presentations and brief discussion of those topics.Recently, Obama has been linked to Derrick Bell; however, notwithstanding the option to read Bell’s summaries of cases in lieu of the opinions themselves, there is no overt endorsement of Derrick Bell, Critical Race Theory (“CRT”), or Bell’s Interest-convergence theory. Obama included many critics of CRT and offered readings that indicate he hoped for substantially more discussion and perhaps, ultimately, economic uplift of those labeled by some of his readings “the truly disadvantaged.” Obama’s choice to use the title of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? as the title of the last group of readings suggests that Obama did not share Bell’s vision of the unalterable nature of racism.The readings, while instructive, are just the starting point of our analysis. Obama’s voice appears in his framing of the suggested topics for student presentations and often aligns with arguments advanced by CRT scholars. His suggested topics encourage students to wrestle with the modern consequences of racism and to question its malleability. Thus, we suggest that the readings and group presentation topics reveal Obama, the teacher, as interested in many of the key questions of Critical Race Theory even as he moved in new and pragmatic directions. For he did not see racism as permanent and he sought inter-racial political coalitions. The syllabus suggests that many of the ideas that surfaced later in candidate and President Obama were present in the classroom of Professor Obama.

Advantages and Human Costs of Military Empire

African Americans, having experienced segregation, race riots, and other forms of bigotry in their military service during World War II, might have been ambivalent about joining the armed forces in the years following. One might also conjecture that a sense of solidarity with Asians as fellow people of color subjected to racial discrimination would have caused African Americans to balk at the prospect of participating in the occupation of Japan and the Korean War. Michael Cullen Green cogently counters such notions in his compelling study of African American military personnel in Japan and Korea from the end of World War II into the 1950s and black periodicals' and Asians' responses to these servicemen. The enlistment and reenlistment of tens of thousands of African Americans in this period indicates that many considered service as preferable to the possibility of unemployment or low wages as a civilian and even welcomed the chance to live in occupied Japan and to prove themselves in combat in Korea. Moreover, maintains Green, although some African American intellectuals and leftists denounced the U.S. military as imperialistic and asserted that black servicemen were being forced to kill Koreans in a race war waged for the benefit of whites, such views were not widely shared among African Americans. Green finds that “Black military service abroad encouraged African Americans to share many of the same racialized attitudes toward Asian peoples held by their white counterparts, to think of themselves first and foremost as Americans (and not as members of what some activists claimed was a global ‘colored’ community), and to identify with their government's foreign policy objectives in Asia (if not its every strategic decision)” (p. 2). Prejudices against Japanese and Koreans, combined with the personal benefits of military service, generated substantial support for U.S. military empire in East Asia among African Americans—not just service personnel, but also in the civilian population.

Songs and Intellectuals:

Songs and Intellectuals:

Who Speaks for Harlem? Kenneth B. Clark, Albert Murray and the Controversies of Black Urban Life

AbstractThis article seeks to rebalance historical assessment of the debate between “pathologists” and “anti-pathologists” which dominated discussions of black urban life in the United States during the 1960s, and which continues to shape ideas about race and the urban environment today. The heated disagreement between the social psychologist Kenneth B. Clark (1914–2005) and the critic and novelist Albert Murray (1916–) presents an opportunity to consider not only the pitfalls and unintended consequences of pathologist representations of black urban life, which have received much attention from scholars in recent years, but also the problematic aspects of anti-pathologist discourse, which have largely been overlooked. The dispute between Clark and Murray also illuminates the intense competition among some African American intellectuals to claim the personal authenticity and disciplinary authority to define and represent black urban life – and to adjudicate the authenticity and authority of others.

“A Peculiar National Character”: Transatlantic Realignment and the Birth of American Cultural Nationalism after 1815

This article argues that the emergence of American cultural nationalism after the War of 1812 developed in self-confident opposition to the Old World, yet was thoroughly influenced by European standards of nationhood. American intellectuals who campaigned for cultural independence from Europe at the same time retained European standards of civilization and esthetics, and were thoroughly influenced by ideas about the relationship between culture and nation that developed in England and Germany. This articles discusses these postcolonial complexities are reflected in debates about American cultural identity in newly founded magazines such as the North American Review that long predated Emerson’s famous “Intellectual Declaration of Independence” of 1837.

Gênero, genealogias &amp; as novas famílias

Será que as novas famílias que temos estudado ultimamente são tão “novas” assim? Alguns exemplos sobre a história contada por alguns intelectuais ingleses, ou americanos na Europa, ou sobre eles, sugere que arranjos os mais variados são testados há muito tempo por casais ou grupos sociais que, no entanto, ainda se apresentam como “famílias” – e também registram suas genealogias na sua forma mais tradicional, “esquecendo” relações que não tenham dado origem a descendentes, ou, que ainda que o tenham, são relações pouco convencionais. Também vale a pena perguntarmos se a nossa forma tradicional de apresentar genealogias não induz, pela própria estrutura formal por nós aprendida, a esses apagamentos da história.