American Prestige Research Articles

A24 and the Asian American Prestige Film

Some of the most visible and acclaimed recent Asian American films (Minari, The Farewell, After Yang, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Past Lives) have been financed or distributed by the Hollywood studio A24. This article explores A24’s “winning formula” for Asian American prestige, a package of discourses around race, independent film, and Asian American representation that appeals to both Oscar voters and Asian American filmgoers ready to venerate the films on social media and in journalistic writing. Specifically, in its advertising and other paratextual materials, A24 uses discourses of cultural authenticity, often around familiar and legible narratives of Asian immigrant families, to position these films as “quality” works worthy of official recognition. Their success in doing so speaks to a moment when Hollywood insiders both recognize the industry’s historical inability to represent Asian stories and desperately want to commend any efforts at doing so.

Forsaking the Market

A central component of the American political ethos has been that there ought to be a complementary relationship between the liberal polity and free-market capitalism. When such a relationship exists the distinction between the two spheres is presumably dissolved by the liberty guaranteed by each to the other. This paper consists of an analysis of editorials and columns in the American prestige press on the question of the desirability of price and wage control during the 1940s and 1970s and assumes that such an issue highlights the relationship of politics and economics. The analysis reveals that the editorial position of the New York Times had changed from reluctant to strong support for controls based on a perceived crisis of fairness in the American political economy during the early 1970s. The concern with fairness during the 1970s was mirrored in reverse in Wall Street Joumal editorials and columns opposing controls and suggests that a scramble for economic shares had taken precedence over the more traditional concern to preserve political and economic liberty.

"Whither Roth Given Bailey"

"Whither Roth Given Bailey"1 Benjamin Schreier (bio) As a prefatory disclaimer, I should cop to seeing no reason to use my space here as an opportunity—that is, under a pretense to Olympian expertise—to summarize Philip Roth's career, provide an overview or appraisal of his literary output, and/or reprise some set of defining events of (or gossipy revelations about) his life. I take it as axiomatic—minority view though it may be—that scholarly reviews should tread elsewhere for their primary labor than the ground of synoptic recapitulation. And anyway, Bailey's biography has been/will be enough written about that other commentators can take that tack. Suffice it to say that I like Roth's work and perhaps more to the point find that the stance or positionality his books relentlessly adopt to be intellectually and ethically significant enough to be worth talking about. Moreover—again, in the interest of apologia more than anything else—I find the tension and indeed difference between Roth's literary work and the public circulation of his persona to be far more critically productive than aesthetically restrictive or morally adjudicatory. So there's that. I have rarely put much professional stock in biography; I don't find it intellectually stimulating, and I don't find the genre an important tool for the kind of literary thinking and scholarship I pursue. To be sure, I like the anecdotes—my favorite line in Bailey's book may be Roth's response to Irving Howe's tepid, pompous praise of Goodbye, Columbus and its critique of Jewish provinciality: "I figure fuck Howe anyway…It isn't my fault people aren't eating as much chopped liver as they used to" (172)—but publicly celebrating delight in wacky historical affect does not a vital intellectual program make. More generally, I consider literary biography as overly susceptible to serving an imperial form of thinking about literature, or as being a technology for refusing the imaginative agencies of writing (that is, as primarily something other than historical record) in the interest of an historical account-keeping of authors and works, a means to pursue a thinking about literature that's organized, fundamentally, by a historicist fetishism—biography being, at least in part, a proxy for literary history, a way of securing the figure of the author as a means to anchor what a scholar might want to say about literary works in [End Page 677] the presumptive socio/ethno/cultural bedrock of "history" (if not through the agency of authorial intention, then often enough through the bio-fantasy of authorship more generally). In fact, this imperial form of representative thinking is fully on display in the dominant modes of Jewish studies intellectuality, especially in the field's attitude toward literature. Jewish studies is a relentlessly and unapologetically historicist enterprise—and it has tended to approach Roth, and Jewish American literature more generally, as an historiographic instrument, signifying the sociological narrative of "breakthrough," the emergence of Jews out of the immigrant ghetto and into the mainstream of American social and cultural life. Certainly at the outset, but arguably throughout his career (albeit in different ways), Philip Roth functioned as a "shibboleth" for American Jews, as Bailey quotes David Boroff from 1963 (conspicuously from the same symposium—held in Israel—in which Roth would famously declare he was not a Jewish writer, but rather a writer who was a Jew), who were "given a choice: Leon Uris or Philip Roth" (220). Philip Roth—or actually, more accurately, "Philip Roth"—offered a way for Jewish community avatars (or would-be avatars) to gauge their own identification with "the" Jewish community. If early on the balance of Jewish American prestige may have tipped more toward the Uris side of the ledger, as the breakthrough narrative became hegemonic, it was certainly Roth's liberated, canny, cosmopolitan recuperation of Jewish affect that would prove to be representationally dominant. As Jewish studies consolidated as an academic field in the Viet Nam era, it transformed these insiderist protocols of Jewish community self-regard into a multidisciplinary analysis of Jewish experience, sublating establishmentarian Jewish clannishness. Its historicist approach to literature could thereby leverage Roth...

The British Council’s role in nourishing the English language teaching industry in the Gulf Cooperation Council region: a visual social semiotic perspective

ABSTRACT Although the interlocking of the British Council with wider political and economic activities and interests is well documented in some parts of the world (Pennycook, A. 2017. The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language. New York: Pearson; Phillipson, R. 2017. “Myths and Realities of ‘Global’ English.” Language Policy 16 (3): 313–331; Rapatahana, V., and P. Bunce. 2012. English Language as Hydra: Its Impacts on Non- English Language Cultures. Bristol: Multilingual Matters), precious little has been written on how the British Council is constructing the reality of the English language as an ‘unstoppable juggernaut’ (Demont-Heinrich, C. 2007. “The Ideological Construction of the Juggernaut of English: A Critical Analysis of American Prestige Press Coverage of the Globalisation of Language.” Studies in Language and Capitalism 2: 107–144) in parts of the Arab world. This paper scrutinizes the ways through which the British Council is nourishing the highly acclaimed English Language Teaching industry in the six member Arab states of the Gulf Cooperation Council: Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. This issue will be explored through visual social semiotics analysis of nine videos that were published on the British Council’s six websites of the Gulf Cooperation Council member states to promote various courses and programs in the region.

Book Review: Media and Democracy by James Curran

Media and Democracy. James Curran. New York, NY: Routledge, 2011. 260 pp. $125 hbk. $44.95 pbk.James Curran, professor of communication and director of Leverhulme Media Research Center at Goldsmith's, University of London, is editor for Routledge Communication and Society Series. Both series and Curran's recent contribution reflect broad scope of his longstanding cultural, historical, and theoretical oversight of field. Although Media and Democracy is primarily a collection of previously published essays and research reports, Curran has made an exemplary and quite successful effort to bring them up-to-date with retrospective assessments at ends of these chapters.The book is divided into five sections that are devoted to cross-national media comparisons, media and democratic theory, new technology, and historical and cultural frameworks for analysis. Understandably, book's attention is concentrated on media in United Kingdom and Europe more generally, but evolution of media systems and institutions in United States also figures quite prominently.Indeed, book begins with a chapter devoted to assessing contributions that American media experiment has made to ways that media and democracy have developed around world. Curran offers high praise for leadership role that American prestige journalism has played, not only at home, but also as a standard against which much of tabloid media and partisan press in Europe and Asia could be compared. Although Curran also credits this journalistic tradition with serving as a model for improving journalism in newly emerging nations, he takes due note of more recent withering of those standards in face of increasing commercialization and concern about performance of media stocks as investments.On occasion, Curran's approach to comparative media analysis takes form of a critical assessment of cornerstone products of other scholars' work. One example is his dissection of Daniel Hallin and Paolo Mancini's erstwhile replacement for Four Theories of Press as the bible of media studies. Noting acclaim that Comparing Media Systems has received, Curran then compares its construction of Liberal Model with similar constructions within Harry Potter novels. In his view, both are intellectually creative but convenient fictions nonetheless. His major criticism is a suggestion that Hallin and Mancini overstate political independence of US media system, while essentially ignoring inequality that he sees as characteristic of its unique form of marketplace democracy.While delivery of pointed criticism of scholarly reflections is undoubtedly a part of his strength, Curran and his colleagues have provided a number of empirically based assessments of consequences that flow from trying to make sense of world through filtered lenses of different media systems. …

Reconstructing Iraq: regime change, Jay Garner, and the ORHA story

When President George W. Bush stood on the decks of the U.S.S. Lincoln in May 2003 and announced the victorious end to major combat in Iraq, he did so in front of a huge banner that proclaimed Mission Accomplished. American forces had successfully removed the regime of Saddam Hussein with rapid decisive operations and yet the United States was unprepared to effectively replace that regime. Gordon Rudd's excellent history reveals why in stark detail. Between the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the creation of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that May, the Allied forces struggled to plug the governance gap created by the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime. Plugging that gap became the job of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. Cobbled together with staff from diverse federal agencies and military branches, ORHA was led by Jay Garner, a key figure in assisting Kurdish refugees following Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Garner and ORHA were given mere weeks to stabilize a nation that had come completely apart at the seams. Iraq's infrastructure was in such a shambles-thanks to years of poor maintenance, international sanctions, and massive looting-that the mission was doomed to fail from the start. Rudd, field historian for ORHA and CPA, offers a critical look at this impossible effort. He shows that, while military planning for the invasion of Iraq had been conducted for over a decade, planning for regime replacement was haphazard at best. The result was an unnecessarily large loss of lives, treasure, time, and American prestige, despite the inspired efforts of Garner and his staff. Based on nearly 300 interviews and time on the ground in Iraq, Rudd's account also provides an unsettling look at the awkward transition from ORHA to CPA, revealing how Ambassador Paul Bremer managed to make things even worse. Garner here emerges as both heroic and tragic, a charismatic leader of great enthusiasm who took on a task of grand proportions but was poorly served by those who chose him for the mission. As Rudd makes clear, the key lesson of this experience is that regime removal solves nothing without effective regime replacement. That lesson, learned the hard way, serves as a cautionary tale for our engagement in future foreign conflicts.

The War Extension and Rhetoric: An Analogic Criticism of US Presidential Rhetoric During the Iraq and Philippine-American Wars

Studies on U.S. presidential war rhetoric tend to ignore the dimension of time, i.e., most focus analysis on the inception of war. In reality, however, many wars are protracted and may last beyond initial public expectations. War messages are therefore employed not only to seek congressional and public support for the inception, but also for the extension of armed conflict abroad. Using the methodology of analogic criticism, this study provides seminal ideas for what it calls the “war rhetoric of extension.” By comparing Bush’s speeches during the current Iraq War and McKinley/Roosevelt’s annual messages during the Philippine-American War, this paper argues that the war rhetoric of extension has the following characteristics: similar patterns of argumentation, epideictic statements that elevate American prestige, and paternalistic language.

The Bay of Pigs

In The Bay of Pigs, Howard Jones has given us the finest narrative yet written about that calamitous event in United States-Cuban relations. Writing with an arresting style and drawing on a bevy of English-language sources, Jones re-creates the drama of the Bay of Pigs. He brings to life not only the operation on Cuba's southern shore but also the tensions among policy makers in the U.S. government as they tried to destroy the Cuban Revolution. Woven together, these two threads of the story fashion a tapestry of tragedy and hubris. The ill-fated invasion remains a tragedy because of those who lost their lives in the assault against, or in the defense of, their beloved homeland. Those in Washington who arrogated to themselves the right to alter the course of Cuban history did so without noticeable circumspection. The failure of April 17, 1961, exposed the enormity of their hubris. The general history of the Bay of Pigs is well known. Especially revealing here is the account of how the site of the invasion was chosen from two alternatives, neither of which offered any hope of success without U.S. air cover. The lies that Americans told invasion leaders about military assistance are a reminder of how security assets are easily jettisoned in pursuit of competing interests—in this case American prestige. U.S. aid to the counterrevolutionary forces did not materialize because of the foolish belief that the administration of John F. Kennedy could maintain plausible deniability about its role in the operation. With an American, Grayston Lynch, the first to land and the first to fight at the Bay of Pigs, plausible deniability quickly became the fiction it really was.

Language, Globalization, and the Triumph of Popular Demand: The Discourse of Populism in American Prestige Press Coverage of the Global Hegemony of English

This article zeroes in on “the American situation” with respect to the global hegemony of English. It does so by way of textual analysis of a number of articles taken from a pool of 275 American prestige press accounts of the global spread of English. Drawing parallels between prestige press and some academic accounts of culture and globalization, the article critically engages instances of a pervasive populist individualist ideology expressed via what the author calls the discourse of populism.

Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering America’s Neutrality, 1914–1917 (review)

Reviewed by: Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering America’s Neutrality, 1914–1917 Ross Kennedy Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering America’s Neutrality, 1914–1917. By Robert W. Tucker. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-8139-2629-2. Notes. Index. Pp. xv, 246. $39.50. In his new book on Woodrow Wilson’s neutrality during World War I, Robert Tucker presents an interesting re-interpretation of a crucial period in twentieth-century American foreign relations. Without much thought about the consequences of his actions, Tucker argues, Wilson early on adopted policies clearly favorable to the Allies in the war. Once set on this course, the president grew ever more committed to it as he came to equate American prestige and the laws of humanity with confronting Germany’s submarine campaign in the Atlantic. Tucker criticizes [End Page 1307] this posture, asserting it was bound to undermine Wilson’s own goals of staying out of the war, mediating a “peace without victory,” and building a new international order based on the League of Nations. In the end, Tucker suggests, Wilson defeated himself. There are several significant points for Wilsonian historiography in this argument. First, Tucker rightly breaks with the work of Arthur S. Link and others in asserting that Wilson’s goals would have been better served by a policy that “combined strict neutrality with measures of preparedness” (p. 79). This approach might have gained the respect of the belligerents and contributed to a deadlock in the conflict – two developments conducive to the aim of ending the war with American mediation. Tucker also provides a thoughtful and detailed analysis of the concept of “neutrality” in the pre-1914 international system, a technical but vital topic missing from nearly all of the monographs on Wilson’s wartime diplomacy. Finally, Tucker echoes Lloyd Ambrosius’s important point that Wilson was not an unqualified internationalist: if a peace league was not based on “American principles,” the United States would continue its traditional refusal to make any political-military commitments overseas (pp. 206—07). For all of the positive qualities of Tucker’s book, however, some aspects of his interpretation are problematic. The author downplays Wilson’s fears of German power, for example, by emphasizing that any concerns the president had on this score were far outweighed by his desire to avoid American entry into the war (pp. 9—10). In my view, this argument tends to obscure Wilson’s conviction that a German victory would threaten American national security, a conviction that shaped not only his neutrality policy but also his approach to peace terms. Tucker also devotes too little attention to Wilson’s preparedness policy. He barely mentions it, even though one of his key claims is that Wilson should have embarked upon a defense build up soon after the war started rather than waiting until late 1915. Readers are thus left with little sense of how Wilson related his military policy to his diplomacy. Still, this is a well-written, provocative work. Tucker takes on a big topic and has cogent points to make about it. I enjoyed reading this book and highly recommend it to anyone interested in Wilson’s statecraft or in U.S. foreign relations in general. Ross Kennedy Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois Copyright © 2008 Society for Military History

Countering the Soviet Threat in the Olympic medals race: The Amateur Sports Act of 1978 and American athletics policy reform

The Olympics were a site of Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. The successes of the Soviet Union eventually captured the attention of American policy-makers, who responded with the Amateur Sports Act of 1978. This article argues that the poor performance of the American team at the 1972 Olympic Games provided a ‘focusing event’ out of which the act emerged. It will further argue that the act's focus on elite athletics was a product of a perception in the late 1960s and 1970s that losses at international sport competitions detracted from American prestige abroad. The conservative political ideologies and athletic experiences of presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford did much to shape the way in which the problems in American athletics were approached.

Hail to the Shrub

With regard to the American presidency, the prestige media perform the primary function of nonpartisan interested mediation between the president and his supporters and the loyal opposition to the president. This article draws on the formal sociology of Georg Simmel as a theoretical background, the American prestige newspapers as a resource, and the presidency of G. W. Bush before and immediately after 9/11/01 as a case study. When, as in the instance of the crisis following the 9/11 skyjackings, there is no partisan opposition to the president, the prestige media take up that role as interested mediators to try to ensure what they as representatives of hegemonic capitalism consider to be the proper functioning of the office.

Foreign Policy and Civil Rights

IN COLD WAR CIVIL RIGHTS, MARY L. DUDZIAK PLACES THE STUDY OF THE POSTWorld War II Civil Rights Movement in the context of United States foreign relations. In doing so, Dudziak expands the scope of civil rights history and offers new insight into why the federal government saw African American civil rights as integral to its foreign policy mission. While there have been a growing number of books that explore how civil rights activists used the cold war strategically to wage civil rights struggles, Dudziak's study is the first to show how the federal government's commitment to Cold War foreign policy seasoned its support for civil rights reforms.' Although civil rights activists had long relied on international audiences for support and solidarity, Dudziak shows that the Cold War's reliance on preserving American prestige abroad made international observers' sentiments integral to foreign policy. Within this context, racial discrimination, especially when it was broadcast to international observers, became problematic to the Cold War effort itself. Moreover, African American civil rights leaders capitalized on the importance of foreign perceptions of the United States by publicizing acts of racial violence abroad. African American participation as soldiers and as workers at home allowed civil rights leaders to claim that they were an indispensable part of American society, and especially of the war effort. Moreover, World War II was

Marketing Modernity: The J. Walter Thompson Company and North American Advertising in Brazil, 1929–1939

Marketing Modernity: The J. Walter Thompson Company and North American Advertising in Brazil, 1929–1939

Domingo F. Sarmiento y la función social de la lengua

SummaryThe linguistic ideas of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (Argentina, 1811–1888), while never stated as an organized whole in his copious Complete Works, occupy a central position in his thought on social organization, education, and the advance of what he called ‘civilization’. While he never proposed to analyze ‘language’ in a systematic way, Sarmiento’s linguistic ideas reveal a surprising intuition. This study attempts to trace some of these reflections, emphasizing materials produced in the period 1841–1843, when Sarmiento participated in a lively polemic motivated, in part, by the controversy of whether or not to break with Peninsular models. Sarmiento found the Spanish language incapable of providing a prestige dialect, since it was the reflection of an inert culture. He strove to distinguish between a language and the graphic symbols which represent it, and to find American prestige linguistic models. Seeing language as a dynamic construct with variations through time, place, and social level, Sarmiento anticipates modern descriptivist and pragmatic theories. He also proposes that the basis of language education is reading, and supports both foreign language teaching and massive translation of foreign texts. Sarmiento’s dismissal of Spain as a literary and linguistic model softened over the years, beginning with the period of ‘codification’ seen between 1843 and 1849. By the period 1879–1883, Sarmiento acknowledged Bello’s great contribution. The Argentine thinker is seen in the context of the Argentine Generation of 1837 whose Naturalistic-Romantic concept of language evolved into a Darwinian positivism.

Revisiting the Gulf of Tonkin Crisis: An Analysis of the Private Communication of President Johnson and his Advisers

This essay explains how the rhetorical response of President Johnson and his advisers to the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964 provides a paradigm case of how a confusing set of events can be given interpretation and structure by means of dramatizing communication. Although the Tonkin events were largely unsubstantiated, narratives were shared in which a hostile enemy had deliberately attacked American vessels on routine patrols. Consequently, American prestige and power were being tested before the world. The confusing events, therefore, were lined up into a more familiar story which then became the justification for further action. The dramatizations swept through private decision-making groups and into the legislative and administrative branches of government resulting in the passage of a congressional resolution. This resolution was the legal weapon needed to expand greatly American involvement in the Vietnam War.

Normalization

occurred immediately preceding and for several weeks after President Carter's December 15, 1978, announcement was rudely disconcerting. This essay discusses the factors which led to the announcement, and some developments in Taiwan since mid-December. Events since recognition suggest that the pre-normalization ambiguity was a relevant variable in avoiding at least some dangerous international situations in East Asia. If not two Chinas, then one China divisible or one China two governments provided an equilibrium which many argue should have been changed only when there were benefits to be gained in terms of American interests or international stability. One must assume that Peking's interests in formalizing its American relations were dominated by Chinese competition with the USSR. If this was the case, its strategy existed largely separate from the Taiwan question. One consideration Peking and Washington chose to ignore was the manner in which normalization and the Taiwan question were to be handled. This appeared to exemplify a sharply diminished American commitment to a steadfast ally, thereby reducing American credibility in Asia and throughout the world. The PRC achieved the maximum take and the minimum give. Normalization showed the PRC's diplomatic toughness and shrewdness. This was even more important than a further slippage of American prestige. Peking's commitment to normalization quickened after the Sino-

Presenting the American Case

holding rather closely the knowledge that this decline has been going on for quite a long while, and that it commenced for reasons having nothing to do with the events or the political leaders of the third quarter of the twentieth century. American prestige in the world reached its height in 191 9 with the founding of the League of Nations and the extraordinary position of Woodrow Wilson, who for a moment seemed to embody, and in that sense to unify, the hopes of the peoples of the civilized world. The moment did not last long, owing in part to a failure of men and institutions in the United States itself. We were not prepared to make the commitment that would have made possible some practical consequences of this extraordinary, if unfocused and fleeting, consensus. It is a sorrowful enough memory, and there is no use to dwell upon it overmuch, but it is useful at this time for at least some person to be clear about what influence means to a nation: it means that other nations want to be like you.

The Failure of AMG in Italy

HE fall of the Parri government in Rome in the autumn of 1945 and the spectacular rise of Giannini's Common Man Party were the culmination of a pattern of administrative errors which began with the Allied Military Government in Sicily and continued through the occupation of North Italy. The resignation of a democratic and representative government and the resurgence of fascism, under a new name, were as much due to Allied administrative chaos and confusion as to Italian political inexperience, governmental ineptitude, and economic ruin. The Allies, with the United States as senior partner in popular esteem, have chosen to enter occupied areas with a philosophy of lofty intentions couched in benign and democratic phraseology. They have had, however, no clear-cut program or administrative techniques designed to fulfill these ends. They have governed, even at the highest levels, with inexperienced men of limited political and administrative vision. By continuing, on the world scene, to act upon the American fiction that industrious individuals with good intentions, regardless of circumscribed professional training, education, or point of view, can be competent at high levels of governmental policy-making or in specialized and difficult fields of operation, we have created confusion and uncertainty. American prestige, once a symbol of hope, has dwindled, although the peoples of Europe and Asia still cling to the dream of disinterested good which our power evokes. AMG has failed in Italy because it has proved impossible, with the governing