American Marketplace Research Articles

An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia , and: Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (review)

Reviewed by: An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia, and: Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora Jessica M. Parr (bio) An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia. By Marie Tyler-McGraw. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 249 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. Cloth, $28.95.) Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. By Stephanie E. Smallwood. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. 273 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. Cloth, $29.95.) In 1999, Alison Games suggested in Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA, 1999) that patterns of migration to the New World reflected economic opportunities. Games’s influential [End Page 183] study focused primarily on voluntary European migration, but her premise nonetheless offered a new way of looking at Atlantic history. Two new books by Stephanie Smallwood and Marie Tyler-McGraw expand upon the study of migration and commercial markets by emphasizing the involuntary migrations of Africans and African Americans. It is important to note here some distinctions between voluntary and involuntary migration, and between voluntary and involuntary labor, and the implications these distinctions have for understanding the connection between migration and economics. As discussions of early fishermen by Games (Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic, Cambridge, MA, 1999) and Peter Pope (Fish into Wine, Chapel Hill, NC, 2003) suggest, these voluntary migrations were not always intended to produce permanent settlements, especially among the earlier migrants. In contrast, involuntary migrations were the result of efforts to develop and sustain permanent economic structures. Both Smallwood and Tyler-McGraw provide important illuminations of these economic structures. In Saltwater Slavery, a title that alludes to “salt waters,” the African–Creoles’ derisive nickname for their newly arrived counterparts, Small-wood retraces the middle passage from the creation of Euro–Africans through the trans-Atlantic voyage itself. She compellingly demonstrates how slavery shifted from Afro–European commerce to a keystone of American commerce: her penultimate chapter is appropriately titled “Turning Atlantic Commodities into American Slaves.” While Games deconstructed the influence of economics on European migration, Small-wood explains that the American marketplace was different from the African marketplace: a difference between “wholesale buyers of people” and “commodifiers of labor” (153). Smallwood’s conclusions about the American slave market are very much in line with previous works, such as Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul (Cambridge, MA, 2001). Economic interests drove the slave trade, but these economic interests were obviously not those of the migrants. Temporally, Marie Tyler-McGraw’s An African Republic picks up where Smallwood leaves off. Tyler-McGraw’s study begins with the abolitionist impulses of the American Revolution and continues into the nineteenth-century politics of the American Colonization Society (ACS). The migration back to Africa sought by colonizationists certainly had economic motivations. Those who advocated the creation of an African republic asserted that such a republic represented the best opportunity for free blacks to be truly free, but in reality this argument was specious [End Page 184] at best (2). The republican ideologies of the Revolution made slavery problematic, yet the very notion of free blacks presented a threat to those whose entire livelihood had been built on the backs of slaves. Free blacks were perceived as even more of a threat after Gabriel’s Rebellion. Tyler-McGraw describes the colonization movement as a sort of “valve” permitting “white Virginians to live with the intensifying contradictions of slavery and liberty” (7, 11, 14). She explains her decision to focus on the ACS in Virginia by asserting that emigration was most beneficial both to free black and white Virginians and because the state was a “pivotal geographic point between emancipation and those who sought to maintain slavery” (3). However unrealistic, the goal of removing free blacks was, it represented both a means to alleviate the immediate fears of insurrection and a means to resolve some of the rising differences between the North and South over the issue of slavery. Under colonization, slave owners were to be compensated as slaves were emancipated, theoretically resolving the complaint that cessation of slavery represented a deprivation of the slave...

Product Safety Regulation as a Model for Financial Services Regulation

Because of product safety regulations, exploding toasters and other dangerous products are rare in the American marketplace. Despite the fact that financial products can also be dangerous, with terms as incomprehensible as an electrical wiring diagram, regulation is far less comprehensive. Most financial regulation turns on the identity of the issuer—federal bank, state thrift, and private issuer—rather than on the product itself. Instead of using safety experts, financial products are regulated mainly by agencies whose principal responsibility is to protect the profitability of the financial institutions that issue the products. A Financial Product Safety Commission would provide coherent regulation of financial products, eliminating their most dangerous features.

Menopause: a review of botanical dietary supplements

Since the release of the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) findings, an increasing number of dietary supplement products specifically targeting women in menopause have appeared in the American marketplace. This growth highlights the need for a critical evaluation of the tolerability and effectiveness of these products. The purpose of this article is to assess the evidence for safety and benefit of botanical monopreparations used for relief of menopause-related symptoms. The Cochrane Library and Medline databases were searched from January 1966 to October 2004, using a detailed list of terms related to botanicals and menopausal symptoms. Studies were considered eligible (1) if they were controlled trials of a botanical monopreparation administered orally for a minimum of 6 weeks to perimenopausal or postmenopausal women with hot flashes and (2) if they included a placebo or comparative treatment arm. Topical preparations, botanical combinations, and dietary interventions, such as soy food or protein, were not included. No language restrictions were imposed on the search. A total of 19 studies met the inclusion criteria. The majority of studies indicate that extract of black cohosh (Actaea racemosa L.) improves menopause-related symptoms; however, methodologic shortcomings in the trials were identified. To date, 4 case reports of possible hepatotoxicity have been published, although previous safety reviews suggest that black cohosh is well tolerated and that adverse events are rare when it is used appropriately. The results of 6 clinical studies on soy (Glycine max L.) isoflavone extracts are mixed. Moreover, the composition and dose of soy supplements varies widely across studies, making comparisons and definitive conclusions difficult. One study challenged the long-term safety of high-dose soy isoflavone extract (150 mg/day for 5 years) on the uterine endometrium. Clinical data from 5 controlled trials assessing the efficacy of semipurified isoflavone red clover (Trifolium pratense L.) leaf extracts to reduce hot flash frequency and severity or to relieve symptoms associated with the domains of the Greene Menopausal Symptom Scale are contradictory. The largest study showed no benefit for reducing symptoms associated with menopause for 2 different red clover isoflavone products compared with placebo. No significant adverse events have been reported in the literature. Single clinical trials do not support the use of dong quai (Angelica sinensis L.), ginseng (Panax ginseng C.A. Mey), or evening primrose seed oil (Oenothera biennis L.) for improving menopausal symptoms. We conclude that black cohosh extracts appear to ease menopausal symptoms; ongoing studies funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will provide more definitive safety and efficacy data. Soy isoflavone extracts appear to have minimal to no effect, although definitive conclusions are difficult given the wide variation in product composition and dose. Long-term safety of higher dosage (150 mg/day) soy isoflavone extracts is uncertain. Semipurified isoflavone red clover leaf extracts have minimal to no effect in reducing menopausal symptoms. Dong quai, ginseng extract, and evening primrose seed oil appear to be ineffective in ameliorating menopausal symptoms at the dosages and in the preparations used in these studies.

Menopause: A review of botanical dietary supplements

Menopause: A review of botanical dietary supplements

Performance Evaluation of the Sysmex pocH-100i Automated Hematology Analyzer

The Sysmex pocH-100i automated hematology analyzer was evaluated at St. John's Regional Health Center, Springfield, Missouri, USA, and compared with the Sysmex KX-21N. The pocH-100i is a compact, fully automated hematology analyzer with the capability for simultaneous analysis of 17 parameters in the whole-blood mode. The touch screen liquid crystal display presents results, and the 3 histograms for white blood cell (WBC), red blood cell (RBC), and platelet (PLT) counts can be printed along with numerical results. This study was performed to provide necessary information for the US Food and Drug Administration study of allowing the product's use in the North American marketplace. The pocH-100i processes approximately 25 samples/hour, uses 2 reagents, and provides for testing in a closed-tube environment, while using only 15 microL in the whole-blood mode and 20 microL in the predilute mode. Using hydrodynamic focusing on the pocH-100i improves the accuracy for RBC and PLT measurements. Our evaluation included studies of correlation, carryover, reproducibility, linearity, and stability. Results with the pocH-100i showed good correlation with those from the KX-21N for the following parameters: WBC; numbers and percentages of lymphocytes, mixed cells (monocytes, eosinophils, and basophils), and neutrophils; RBC; hemoglobin; hematocrit; mean corpuscular volume; mean corpuscular hemoglobin; mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentration; PLT; red cell distribution width SD (RDW-SD); RDW coefficient of variation; and mean platelet volume. Carryover and reproducibility were well within the manufacturer's specifications. The pocH-100i showed linearity over the entire range for all parameters studied. A reference range for a healthy population was also established. We conclude that the overall performance of the pocH-100i is excellent and compares favorably with that of the KX-21N.

The new politics of consumption: promoting sustainability in the American marketplace

While mainstream policymakers in the United States have to date evinced little interest in sustainable consumption, this does not mean that a political agenda designed to highlight the adverse impacts of consumerism has failed to take root in the country. In fact, a considerable number of activities are occurring that are broadly consistent with the aims of sustainable consumption. Inchoate though these efforts may be, there are indications that some proponents are beginning to link up and to forge a more readily definable social movement. The following discussion considers these multifarious expressions in accordance with a tripartite typology: social and political protest campaigns, lifestyle reinventions, and public policy initiatives. Of notable interest is that efforts to problematize consumerism do not stem from environmental concerns, but instead evolve out of public unease regarding such issues as working hours, leisure time, and family life. This situation raises questions about whether the common range of concepts associated with sustainable consumption accurately captures political initiatives in the United States to forge a link between declining well-being and mass consumption.

A Note on Commercial Speech in the Era of Late Capitalism

A Note on Commercial Speech in the Era of Late Capitalism

The weather report for the supply chain: a longitudinal analysis of the ISM/Forrester Research Reports on Technology in Supply Management, 2001‐2003

This article presents an analysis of three years results from the quarterly Report on Technology in Supply Management, conducted through a joint effort of the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) (formerly the National Association of Purchasing Managers) and Forrester Research. This report provides the best snapshot on the growth of e‐procurement in the United States. However, the sponsors do not publicly provide any analysis on the trends the data show from quarter‐to‐quarter. Now, with three years of available data from the twelve quarterly surveys conducted to date, there is an opportunity to analyze the adoption rates of e‐procurement tools, techniques and protocols in the American marketplace. The author of this study has conducted just such a longitudinal analysis of the ISM/Forrester data, examining the trends for organizations across the U.S. marketplace. What is demonstrated is that overall, both in manufacturing and service‐oriented firms and in large and small purchasing organizations, e‐procurement methods are rising and reaching “critical mass” in most areas with the “e‐way” fast becoming “the way”. However, important differences due exist between the groups and their specific needs, motivations, and results in their shift to an electronic acquisition environment. These are highlighted and discussed in this article.

A Purchase on Goodness: Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall , and Fraught Individualism

Subjectivity, as the innermost core of the private, was always already oriented to an audience. --Jurgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Scholarly assessment of Fanny Fern has in many ways paralleled the social reception of her most popular heroine, Hall. Both are portrayed as initially plagued by an oppressive, limiting, and condescending patriarchal community. They are then critically maligned and shunned when they attempt to throw off the shackles of patriarchy in order to write and earn money as independent women. In the end, they achieve a kind of miraculous triumph in that their writings--precisely for the way they eschew convention and voice the wrongs of the oppressed--become hugely successful, earning their authors riches, fame, and a delicious revenge over the corrupt society that had previously oppressed them. Fern's triumph (and the triumph of her heroine, Ruth) lies in her ability to defy and finally to transcend the stultifying codes for true that subjected women to the silence, oppression, and dependency of the patriarchal home. (1) Hall is, as critics have noted, a revolutionary novel precisely for the way it employs the conventions of sentimental literature only to reveal them as, at least in part, culturally bankrupt. In place of sentiment, Fern champions the free market as a legitimate source for women's serf-fulfillment, appropriating public labor and economic acquisitiveness as acceptable, even laudable, for American women. Fern was herself a remarkably efficient and successful exemplar for such an ethic. Seventy thousand copies of her first book, Fern Leaves from Fanny's Portfolio (1853), sold in America within a year of its publication, and another twenty nine thousand copies sold in England, making Fern Leaves one of America's first best-sellers. Hall (1855), Fern's second book, sold equally well. Her popularity continued to rise (she was compared to Stowe and Dickens), and by 1855 she was making the unheard-of sum of one hundred dollars per article for Robert Bonner's weekly newspaper, the New York Ledger, a paper that benefited tremendously from its affiliation with Fern. Hall gave rise to associated products like a Ruth Hall bonnet, in elegant black gauze, a musical score called The Hall Schottische, and a popular song called Little Daisy about Ruth's daughter who dies early in the novel. (2) Fern's divided identity--on the one hand she is portrayed as subversive, unconventional, and maligned by her contemporaries, on the other her overwhelming popularity opens up entire vistas of agency and representation for those on whose behalf she ostensibly writes--reveals much about both the reformist ideals that drive sentimental and the American marketplace in the mid-nineteenth century. (3) persona that drives Fern's (and, in Fern's novel, Ruth's) popularity in the market and her controversial status in the media continually fluctuates between a beleaguered, unfairly criticized sense of authenticity, and an overwhelming popularity that results from the discovery and acknowledgment of that same authenticity. This fantasy of being recognized for a previously unacknowledged or oppressed sense of personal value is consistent with the traditional plot line of what Nina Baym refers to as fiction in the mid-nineteenth century. (4) Hall, much like other popular woman's of the day, connects her heroine's true explicitly to her prowess as a consumer. (5) Fern's novel imbues this formula with particular resonance and urgency, for her heroine's goodness, authenticity, and essential womanhood are repeatedly threatened, and in order to stave off those threats she must continually improvise new fashions and innovative forms of self-expression in order to keep her essential self from becoming overwhelmed by the jealous masses. popularity of Fern's novel owes a great deal to the way it encourages readers to identify with and even emulate Ruth's productively fashionable energy. …

"His Delirious Solace": Consummation, Consumption, and Reform in Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance

Coverdak looks on. From Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (London: Service andPaton, 1899), 250. "His Delirious Solace": Consummation,Consumption, and Reform in Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance GALE TEMPLE INTRODUCTION: RESTLESS CITIZENSHIP In Forty Years of American Life, 1821—1861, Thomas Low Nichols, a nineteenth-century physician and social critic, suggests that contentment with one's position in the socioeconomic hierarchy is antithetical to American life. Citizenship, for Nichols, is characterized by an endless struggle between actual and ideal selves, between the mundane reality of one's existing class status and the fantasy of the fulfilled self that the American marketplace forever dangles just beyond reach. Nichols writes: There is no such thing in America as being contented with one's position or condition. The poor struggle to be rich, the rich to be richer. Every one is tugging, trying, scheming to advance —to get ahead. It is a great scramble, in which all are troubled and none are satisfied. In Europe, the poor man, as a rule, knows that he must remain poor, and he submits to his lot, and tries to make the best of it. . . . Not so in America. Every other little ragged boy dreams of being President or millionaire. The dream may be a pleasant one while it lasts, but what of the disappointing reality? What of the excited, FSQ I V. 49 I 4TH QUARTER | 2003 285 GALE TEMPLE restless, feverish life spent in the pursuit of phantoms?1 Nichols suggests that resistance to self-consummation is both a characteristic marker of American citizenship and an unremitting source of disappointment and disillusionment. Americans restlessly pursue "phantoms" and lose sight of what Nichols would view as more authentic sources of pleasure and fulfillment in their lives.· the "domestic affections, " the "chief source of human happiness."2 Nichols's critique represents an appropriate paradigm for reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1852 novel, The Blithedale Romance . The communal farm of Blithedale fails, Hawthorne implies, for many of the same reasons Nichols believes American citizenship fails: Its participants' notions of reform and citizenship are, from the start, wedded to a market-friendly vision of ideal selfhood; consequently, they resist both selfand social consummation. This resistance in turn precludes the primary male characters in Hawthorne's text—the narrator Coverdale and the hyper-masculine reformer Hollingsworth— from allowing their female or working-class counterparts a sense of what Christopher Newfield calls "reciprocal influence and agency," for they view women as the always deferred and always objectified visions of their own other-oriented self-fulfillment .3 In other words, they see women and impoverished members of the working class as commodities that exist to serve the impossible realization of their own ideal selves.4 The inequality of this dynamic both results from and fosters a persistent sense of entitlement that denies subjectivity and agency to women, despite the fact that the Blithedale enterprise, much like the Brook Farm community on which it is modeled, promises new forms of equality and liberation to women.5 My argument is informed, in part, by the work of Sacvan Bercovitch on the legacy of the Puritan jeremiad and by the writings of Marxist theorist Marshall Berman. Bercovitch argues that the jeremiad, or the spiritual lament, was far more than just a common rhetorical trope for the Puritans: Simultaneously critiquing a current fallen state of affairs and anticipating an amended future, it structured in fundamental ways 286 CONSUMMATION AND REFORM IN BLITHEDALE how the Puritans thought of themselves and their collective destiny. And it inaugurated an ideological pattern that still characterizes the history of America's sense of itself as a collectivity . In Bercovitch's words: [The American jeremiad] made anxiety its end as well as its means. Crisis was the social norm it sought to inculcate. The very concept of errand , after all, implied a state of unfulfillment. The future, though divinely assured, was never quite there, and New England's Jeremiahs set out to provide the sense of insecurity that would ensure the outcome. Denouncing or affirming , their vision fed on the distance between promise and fact.6 The jeremiad created enduring anxiety over the need to remedy existing conditions so they will be more consistent...

The compromise of embedded liberalism, American trade remedy law, and Canadian softwood lumber: Can't we all just get along?

The long‐running U.S.‐Canada softwood lumber dispute has always involved basic disagreements over forest policy, the protectionist impulses of a disgruntled U.S. forest sector, and the perceived vindictiveness of U.S. trade law applied to one of America's closest allies and its largest trading partner. The public debate about this dispute has tended to characterize it as an anomaly in an increasingly integrated and liberalized North American marketplace. However, the softwood dispute is much more than a single, seemingly intractable, trade irritant. Softwood is also a microcosm of the broader debate over public policy in an age of globalization. At the heart of this debate is the so‐called “compromise of embedded liberalism” whereby public policy has been shaped to help alleviate some of the negative effects of trade and capital market liberalization. Preserving this “compromise” has become increasingly problematic for the development of public policy and for maintaining support for additional liberalization. Domestic trade remedy laws, despite their negative impact in sectors like softwood, have always been a part of this “compromise.” This paper argues that the global rise in popularity of trade remedy law is part of the struggle for public policy to preserve the “compromise” and that, properly shaped within the World Trade Organization, could yet emerge as an important tool for preserving support for additional liberalization.

American Homo: Community and Perversity

Jeffrey Escoffier traces the emergence of a gay and lesbian identity over the last four decades in this wide-ranging collection of his most influential essays. Situating the development of gay and lesbian communities in a broad sweep of recent American history, Escoffier examines how an urban subculture created by stigmatized and invisible men and women evolved into a vital public community with an activist agenda and an influential position in contemporary American culture.Detailing what he calls the political economy of the closet, Escoffier argues that the market process often played a crucial role (for better or for worse) in the emergence of gay and lesbian communities, and conversely, that these new communities have significantly impacted the American marketplace. From the development of a camp sensibility in popular culture - inspired by the erotic exhibitionism of drag queens - to the public reformation of safer-sex guidelines, Escoffier demonstrates how the gay movement has gradually acquired both social authority and recognition as a booming market.Throughout the ongoing struggle for legitimacy, gays and lesbians have had to negotiate the historical tension between the homoeroticism that courses through American culture and periodic outbreaks of homophobic paranoia. Escoffier follows the lesbian and gay movement across the contested terrain of American life between the poles of multiculturalism and the religious right, to reveal how sexual minorities constitute a challenge to American society even as they are thoroughly integrated as citizens and kin. From McCarthy-era witchhunts to the activism of Queer Nation, Escoffier vividly describes the characteristic American homosexual journey through the tangled web of authenticity, identity, and community.

“Dead letters! … Dead Men?”: The Rhetoric of the Office in Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener”

Although a good deal of recent critical attention to Melville's writing has followed the lead of Robert K. Martin in addressing the issue of sexuality, the predominant themes in discussions of “Bartleby” remain changes in the nature of the workplace in antebellum America and transformations in capitalism. But, if one of the abiding mysteries of the story is the failure of the lawyer–narrator to sever his relationship with his young scrivener once Bartleby embarks upon his policy of preferring not to, it is a mystery that makes sense within both of these critical discourses. On the one hand, the longevity of the relationship dramatizes a tension implicit in Michael Gilmore's suggestion that the lawyer–narrator straddles the old and the new economic orders of the American market-place. Although he may employ his scriveners “as a species of productive property and little else”, his attachment to his employees is overwhelmingly paternalistic and protective. On the other hand, James Creech suggests that Pierre (published the year before “Bartleby”) is a novel preoccupied with the closeting of homosexual identity within the values of an American middleclass family, while Gregory Woods describes Melville as the nearest thing in the prose world of the American Renaissance to the Good Gay Poet Whitman. In this critical context the longevity of the relationship suggests that the lawyer–narrator's desire to know Bartleby, to protect him, to tolerate him, to be close to him, to have him for his own, and then to retell the story of their relationship, needs to be considered in relation to sexual desire.

A Consuming Fire The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South (review)

enee to black pianists ofthe time, said, "They use die piano exacdy like a banjo." The tango, all the rage along with ragtime, led to a new "tango" banjo, based on the mandolin, which had no fifth string and was played by pick. This tenor banjo eclipsed the five-string banjo in popularity, as it was more suited to the fast chording demanded by die new music oftheJazz Age, and Gura and Bollman leave off their story as the five-string banjo's rise to popularity ends. In the Appalachians, diough, the five-string remained central to that population's social music, but it didn't attain national prominence again until the 1940s saw the introduction of bluegrass music. "It has been the banjo's long journey from the southern plantation to the Victorian parlor that has remained shrouded," Gura and Bollman conclude, "in part because ofthe scarcity ofsource materials through which such a history could be assembled . . ." The sheer volume and incredible condition of the authors' source material brings one back to this very fine book again and again, for in these images we can see into the nineteenth century, and with the informative text we are given not only the rich history of the banjo but also a remarkable study of the American marketplace. A Consuming Fire The Fall ofthe Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South By Eugene Genovese University of Georgia Press, 1999 169 pp. Cloth $24.95 Reviewed by Annette Laing, assistant professor of colonial and revolutionary American history at Georgia Southern University, whose recent work includes a book about the relationship between Anglican missionaries and popular religious culture in British America. Poor God. He must find it thoroughly tiresome to be constandy called upon to endorse all sorts ofpeculiar causes. Surely, few causes for which His blessing has ever been solicited (and assumed to be granted) were more peculiar than the "Peculiar Institution" itself, slavery in the antebellum South. After all of the Biblical justifications presented on its behalf, not to mention the supposed patronage of the Almighty, it is easy to imagine how devastating the South's defeat in the Civil 84 southern cultures, Fall2000 : Reviews War was for many of slavery's defenders. Yet not everyone was unprepared for this disaster. Southern Christian intellectuals had already sounded jeremiads in which they warned that the South was doomed unless it reformed slavery in accordance with Christian ideas. Eugene Genovese examines the antebellum Christian call to reform slavery— and the consequences of its failure—in A Consuming Fire, the published version of his Lamar Memorial Lectures given at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. Although the subtide promises that the book deals with "The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind ofthe White Christian South," its scope extends beyond this promise. It emerges as a broad assessment ofthe efforts ofsouthern intellectuals to reconcile first slavery, and dien postwar racial segregation, with Christianity. A Consuming Fire focuses on the southern theorists who argued that God had indeed entrusted white southerners with slavery, but that he also required them to render it humane. Genovese discusses the reformers' arguments and assesses whether slaveowners were plagued by guilt over slavery. His conclusion, implied in the subtide, is that slaveowners and reformists shared a single view, and that dierefore slaveowners agreed with die theorists: They felt no guilt about slavery perse or about the exploitation oflabor that it involved, since God had apparendy approved the arrangement. They were, however, troubled by its concomitant impact on families. The question ofslaveowners' views is an intriguing one, and itis commendable diat Genovese regards slaveowners as real people who were products of their time, rather than as Legree-esque devils incarnate. However, this little volume raises more questions than it answers for those who wish to understand some of the conflicted personalities behind the facade of the plantation legend. Perhaps this is a result of the inevitable constraints of a volume of this sort, and most especially die limitations of the lecture format. For whatever reason, most slaveowners remain shadowy figures in this book. The majority ofthe voices we hearin support ofreform are those ofthe clergy, for the intellectuals whom Genovese cites...

The British Culture Industries and the Mythology of the American Market: Cultural Policy and Cultural Exports in the 1940s and 1990s

This article compares the marketing and reception of British motion pictures in the U.S. market during the 1940s and 1990s. In both eras, British filmmakers were captivated by the fantasy of conquering the American marketplace. They viewed their movies as a fundamentally new kind of product that made it possible to challenge Hollywood on its own terrain.

Peter Kwong, Forbidden Workers: Illegal Chinese Immigrants and American Labor. New York: The New Press, 1997. xi + 273 pp. $24.00 cloth; $14.95 paper.

The publication of Chinatown, New York: Labor and Politics, 1930–1950 (1979) and The New Chinatown (1987, rev. ed., 1996) established Peter Kwong as an authority on New York City's Chinese-American community. His latest book confirms this position. Kwong retraces some familiar ground, but only after first probing the causes, characteristics, and consequences of illegal Chinese immigration. He discusses this problem in relation to the immigration and labor policies of the United States government and organized labor while maintaining that the fundamental difficulties Chinese illegals encounter originate in the American marketplace. “The problem of illegal immigration, including Chinese immigration,” Kwong contends, “can only be understood in the context of the underlying supply-and-demand principle enshrined in traditional U.S. economics” (7). In brief, an abundance of low-wage jobs exist, made possible by lax enforcement of governmental labor standards and a weak labor movement. Indeed, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which imposed sanctions on employers who “knowingly” hire undocumented immigrants, has instead led to their employment on substandard terms without reducing their numbers.

"The Poetess" and Poe's Performance of the Feminine

ELIZA RICHARDS "The Poetess" and Poe's Performance of the Feminine . . . forms that no man can discover For the tears that drip all over . . . Poe, "Dream-Land"|oe's aesthetic discourse registers a ctisis of masculine literary sentiment sparked by the influx of women poets to the American marketplace in the 1830s and 40s. At this time, white, middleclass women, supposed embodiments of the emotions associated with privatized domestic life, gained greater sanction not only to write, but also to publish in the most "intimate" of forms, lyric poetry. "The whole tendency of the age is Magazine-ward," Poe proclaims in 1846, and women poets were invited to cultivate this potentially wayward public medium with genteel literary sentiments (Marginalia 139). Concerned that this emerging group might be more constitutionally suited to write poetry than they, male writers sought to define a specifically masculine literary sensibility. Stabilizing the shifting ground of aesthetic authority required delicacy, however, in order not to alienate female readers; for just as women entered the market in unprecedented numbers as producers of literature, they were also gaining influence as a powerful class of literary consumers.1 Poe's solution to the dilemma of women's encroachment in the literary domain did not lie in a simple dismissal of female achievement, because women's attention, both personal and literary, was extremely Arizona Quarterly Volume 55, Number 2, Summer 1999 Copyright © 1999 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1 610 Eliza Richards important to his poetic practices. Instead, he imagined women poets in ways that seek to reconcile their multiple roles: muse, literary competitor , and audience for his own poetry. While designating women as the "natural" site of poetic utterance, Poe also argues that poetic "truth" lies in a theatrical performance of the feminine.2 Identifying women poets with his poetic images of women, Poe enacts a drama of evacuation within his poems in which he drains women of their! poetic potency while claiming that the transfer of powers is in the spirit of feminine mimicry. For an audience of women poets, Poe himself performs a "feminine" poetry which simultaneously mirrors and upstages their own practices. He extends and consolidates these aesthetic claims in his criticism , an almost exclusively male genre in the 1840s. Reappraising the impact of these forgotten women poets upon a canonical figure presents new ways to understand the work of canonical writers, the canonization process, and the structure and habits of American literary criticism.3 Imagining women as the power generators of poetic discourse, Poe's critical interest in their work is extensive and sustained. Although his reviews of women poets outnumber those of male poets in his later criticism , they are rarely treated in studies of his poetics.4 When not ignored altogether, these frequently positive reviews are usually dismissed as either a display of vapid gallantry or an aberration in taste bearing little relation to his more serious considerations of male peers such as Hawthorne and Longfellow. In his own time, however, Poe was considered a leading—and by far the most rigorous—critic of female writers, discriminating at one point between "poetesses (an absurd but necessary word)," and female poets worthy of admiration and serious critique (Marginalia 58-59). To the second category belonged writers like Frances Sargent Osgood, Sarah Helen Whitman, Elizabeth Barrett, Amelia Welby, and Elizabeth Oakes Smith. In a review of Barrett's Drama of Exile, Poe laments that "the inherent chivalry of the critical man" results in the "unhappy lot of the authoress to be subjected, time after time, to the downright degradation of mere puffery" (Complete 12: 1). Poe promises, in contrast, to pay Barrett the respect of telling her "the truth" about her work (2). While proving Poe's critical pronouncements "sincere" at any juncture would be a hopeless task, his critical treatment of women poets is comparable to that of their male counterparts. Poe's critical pronouncements on women's poetry are torn between delimiting a separate character for female genius and rewarding poet- Poe's Performance of the Feminine esses by welcoming them into the male world of the "poet." Poe trounces anthologist Rufus Griswold, for example, for elevating "aristocrats " over "poets" in...

The Korean versus American marketplace: Consumer reactions to foreign products

The Republic of Korea recently became one of the member countries of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Such developed-nation status requires Korea to open its consumer goods and financial markets. As a more open Korean market becomes increasingly attractive to foreign manufacturers and investors, it is critical for foreign marketers to understand how Korean consumers perceive and evaluate imported goods. This study examines how Koreans in comparison with Americans react to foreign-made products. The results of the study show that both Korean and U.S. consumers, in general, relied heavily on specific intrinsic attributes of products as the basis for their evaluations of the product quality. Interestingly, Koreans considered country-of-manufacture information as equally important in this situation. However, when they determined their purchase intentions, neither Koreans nor Americans valued country labels of the products; they again used product attribute information. The implications of the results for foreign marketers in Korea are discussed. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Reading Material: Contextualizing Clothing in the Work of Anzia Yezierska

Throughout her fiction, the Russian Jewish immigrant writer Anzia Yezierska displays an acute awareness of the role of commodities in the lives of recent immigrants. For Yezierska, as for her contemporaries, the Jewish immigrant writers Mary Antin and Abraham Cahan, the commodity that most visibly signifies the seductive power of the early twentieth-century American marketplace is clothing, the factory-produced garments available at low prices to the masses. In the work of these writers, ready-made clothing is prized for its almost magical transformative power, its aura ,of instant respectability; it functions as testimony of an immigrant's new American status, the external proof of economic and cultural viability.(1) But historically, many Russian Jewish immigrants were both producers and consumers of ready-made clothing; for those immigrants, clothing often became an arena of highly-charged and conflicting signification, alternately a site of intense struggle and a source of pleasure. In certain texts by Anzia Yezierska--in her autobiographical writings and in two early short stories--she presents Jewish female garment workers who become profoundly alienated from clothing; in those texts, clothing is associated with the disheartening fixity of an exploitative American economic system. In contrast, in her 1923 novel Salome of the Tenements, Yezierska depicts a Jewish clothing worker who indulges in an intensely personal and erotic relation to clothing; in that novel, clothing is used as a vehicle to engage in a fascinating attempt to transgress and transcend forms of economic and social hierarchy. Since the reprinting of Yezierska's major works of fiction began in the 1970s, critics have largely focused on Yezierska's exploration of the difficult position of women in traditionally patriarchal Jewish families; the feminist implications of her work have been well explored. But what is not often recognized is Yezierska's fascination with the American class system and its signifiers. Indeed, her strategic construction of her own life story as a rags-to-riches narrative attests to her awareness of American ideologies of class mobility. According to her own representation of her history, she was born into poverty in Russia during the 1880s; at the age of ten she settled with her large family in New York's Lower East Side Jewish ghetto.(2) She labored as a servant and a factory worker before attending Columbia University Teachers College under the patronage of a wealthy philanthropist. After the publication in 1920 of Hungry Hearts, a short story collection that was subsequently made into a Hollywood film, she achieved popular fame. The measured success of such works as Hungry Hearts, Children of Loneliness, Salome of the Tenements, and Bread Givers during the 1920s can be interpreted as partially predicated on the legend of Yezierska's difficult early years in America, the sweatshop Cinderella story that was consistently used to publicize and promote her work. Throughout the rest of her life--her precipitous decline into obscurity during the 1930s and the partial recovery of her reputation during the 1950s--Yezierska continued to take life in the East Side ghetto as her subject matter. Yet, it was not simply Yezierska's fiction that formed a bridge to her past; it was also, by her own account, her attitude toward commodifies--chiefly clothing--that marked her difference from fully assimilated immigrants and mainstream Americans. When she was a child, ready-made clothing symbolized the conventionality she coveted; she recalled, felt like the village idiot in my immigrant clothes so different from the clothes of the other children (Red Ribbon 39). After she had achieved fame as a writer specializing in working-class immigrant fiction, she publicly performed her identity through her clothing: Why had I never dressed like other women? It wasn't just a matter of being poor. The poorest shopgirl with her mind on style managed to look as smart as other shopgirls. …

The American marketplace: demographics and spending patterns

The American marketplace: demographics and spending patterns