American Public Sphere Research Articles

Moral Reasoning and the Online Debate About Iraq

How a democratic nation deliberates about war is one of the most important political questions that can be asked. This study examines how the American public sphere debated the attack on Iraq between August and October 2002, marking the time when the Bush administration began discussing a potential attack against Iraq and when Congress authorized the use of force for that purpose. The study specifically compares the pattern of argument in two different forums of the public sphere: (a) the opinion pages of 23 different U.S. newspapers from across the political spectrum and (b) online discussion groups. Of particular interest was the comparative weight given to moral argument. This particular war was preemptive and unprovoked. Hence, much of the world disapproved. In such a case, one might expect moral considerations to be an important aspect of the debate. This study found that, in comparison at least with opinion in the elite press, the pattern of opinion online was different. The online discussion resembled more the left category of newspapers in terms of arguments made for or against the war, and more of the points debated were moral in nature. The influence of the online discussion groups may not be large, certainly in comparison with the debate in the newspapers, but between their different form and more inclusive participation, they do seem to produce more of the moral content that critical theorists like Habermas are looking for in social deliberation.

New Deal Navajo linguistics: Language ideology and political transformation

This project is a socio-historical study exploring how linguist Robert Young’s documentation of Navajo supported the federal government’s political and economic agenda for the Navajo reservation during the New Deal. I examine Robert Young’s papers and publications to show how his work in support of John Collier’s philosophy of cultural pluralism and goal of preserving Native cultures also helped support the federal government’s efforts to create a Navajo polity patterned after the US government. Young’s documentation of Navajo helped to create a standardized register for use in political and educational institutions, helped to teach and model the federal government’s concept of the ideal modern Navajo citizen, and attempted to create a Navajo public sphere modeled on the American public sphere.

A Secular Alternative: Primo Levi's Place in American Holocaust Discourse

This essay sketches Primo Levi's emergence from obscurity to near-universal acclaim in the United States, where he is now considered one of the most important witnesses of the Nazi genocide and a significant twentieth-century writer. As he emerged into the American public sphere, Levi came to occupy a particular discursive place as a representative bearer of Enlightenment values. Among intellectuals across the political spectrum his reputation for sobriety and secular reason stands against other, more dominant tendencies in American Holocaust culture, such as the sacralization of the genocide often associated with another survivor-writer, Elie Wiesel.

‘I felt a funeral in my brain’: The politics of representation in HBO's Six Feet Under

From the isolation of the hospital bed to the specialization of the mortuary, the experiential dynamics of grief and dying are largely excluded from the American public sphere. And yet death persists and proliferates in the entertainment and news industries in the form of virtual spectacle. Through an examination of the popular television series Six Feet Under, this study explores the place of representation in inciting, challenging and sustaining expressions of anxiety and social repression surrounding the experience of death and grief in contemporary life. The work of theorist Fredric Jameson on the Freudian notion of historical figurability provides methodological grounding for understanding such works of mass culture as both expressive and productive of the political status quo.

Islam and the politics of enchantment

The North American public sphere is suffused with claims and counter‐claims about the relationship between Islam and violence. Schools and publishers have responded with training programmes for teachers and curriculum units for students introducing them to the Middle East and its dominant religious tradition. Such programmes are often accused by local parents and national intellectuals of pandering to Muslim sensitivities by whitewashing distasteful historical events and even proselytizing young people. Focusing on a 2002 lawsuit filed against California's Byron Union School District, by parents upset by a classroom role‐playing exercise on Islam, this paper argues that political fears about terrorist infiltration into US society are building on powerful emotional and cultural concerns about the nature of ritual and the spiritual safety of children exposed to information about other religions. By encouraging public education as a response to political and cultural tensions, educators may in fact be heightening the public's concerns about Islam as a comprehensive threat.RésuméDans la sphère publique nord‐américaine, on entend dire tout et son contraire à propos de la relation entre l’islam et la violence. En réponse, les écoles et les éditeurs ont produit des programmes de formation des enseignants et des unités d’enseignement présentant le Moyen Orient et sa tradition religieuse dominante. Les parents, au niveau local, et les intellectuels au niveau national accusent souvent ces programmes de flatter la susceptibilité musulmane en occultant les événements historiques déplaisants, et même de faire du prosélytisme auprès des jeunes. En se concentrant sur un procès intenté en 2002 au district scolaire de Byron Union en Californie par des parents troublés par un jeu de rôles en classe sur le thème de l’islam, l’auteur affirme que les craintes politiques d’infiltration terroriste dans la société américaine s’enracinent dans de puissantes inquiétudes émotionnelles et culturelles relatives à la nature du rituel et à la sécurité spirituelle des enfants exposés à des informations sur d’autres religions. En encourageant la sensibilisation publique en réponse aux tensions politiques et culturelles, les éducateurs pourraient en réalité attiser les craintes d’une opinion publique qui perçoit dans l’islam une menace omniprésente.

Introduction to “From ‘Tribute System’ to ‘Peaceful Rise’: American Historians, Political Scientists, and Policy Analysts Discuss China's Foreign Relations”

AbstractThe papers in this special issue are the products of a conference, “History and China's Foreign Relations: The Achievements and Contradictions of American Scholarship, ” held at the University of Southern California in February 2008. All of us, professors, policy advisors and policy-makers, think it would be helpful if there was more informed discussion among the general public of the challenges of China's rise in the world and our responses to it, but we all acknowledge that the American public sphere is a big mess, fragmented by the apparent riches of the Internet, dumbed down to the vanishing point in the major media. Can we as scholars make some beginnings in drawing on China's long and complex history of relations with other peoples to find generalizations and patterns that help to illuminate the present for the policy elite and for the concerned public?

Moral muting in US newspaper op-eds debating the attack on Iraq

This article examines a distinct form of moral argumentation found to be common in a corpus of 500 editorials and opinion pieces written in 23 US newspapers and news magazines between August and October 2002 debating whether or not the US should attack Iraq. The purpose of the article is to delineate this communicative phenomenon, which we call moral muting . Moral muting occurs when a message either blunts the moral considerations involved in a case or presents an equivocal moral meaning. Moral muting overlaps with but is distinct from mitigation, and even when it involves mitigation, moral muting depends on devices that go beyond those generally associated with conversational mitigation. The examination of moral muting offered here contributes to a better understanding of moral communication in general and of the conduct of the American public sphere.

NEOLIBERALISM, NOSTALGIA, RACE POLITICS, AND THE AMERICAN PUBLIC SPHERE

I done got my feet caught up in the sweet flypaper of life. Langston Hughes, 1955 April 24, 2005: Katy Hogan, owner of the radical Chicago coffeehouse Heartland Cafe, at speak-out against the Iraq ...

Essentialism, Consistency and Islam: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism

Since 9/11, and obviously for some considerable time before it, a question has arisen about the relationship between Islam and terrorism. Is it legitimate to prefix the term ‘terrorism’ with the ad...

Muslims' Place in the American Public Sphere: Hope, Fears, and Aspirations, edited by Zahid H. Bukhari, Sulayman S. Nyang, Mumtaz Ahmad, and John L. Esposito. Walnut Creek, Cal.: Alta Mira Press, 2004, 396 pp.; $75.00 USD (cloth), $29.95 USD (paper)

Muslims' Place in the American Public Sphere: Hope, Fears, and Aspirations, edited by Zahid H. Bukhari, Sulayman S. Nyang, Mumtaz Ahmad, and John L. Esposito. Walnut Creek, Cal.: Alta Mira Press, 2004, 396 pp.; $75.00 USD (cloth), $29.95 USD (paper)

The Triumph of Death: National Security and Imperial Erasures in Don DeLillo's Underworld

Abstract: Writing against the dominant tendencies of popular historical memory in the 1990s, Don DeLillo's Underworld depicts the civic and ecological catastrophes left in the wake of the cold war. In particular, DeLillo surveys the wreckage of the American public sphere in ways that are both comic and distressing. Yet Underworld's critique remains partial. Although Underworld highlights the complicity of the national security state in the erosion of national community, he is nevertheless unable to fully imagine the consequences of the cold war for other communities, especially Native American communities in the nuclear West, who were most severely trampled by it.

Katrina, the Media and the American Public Sphere

Katrina, the Media and the American Public Sphere

Between Consensus and Conflict: Habermas, Post-Modern Agonism and the Early American Public Sphere

Efforts thus far to bridge the distance between Habermasian public sphere theory and post-modernism have failed, and recent studies only reify the bifurcation. Some theorists trace this problem to misreadings of Habermas's recent works that overemphasize the weight he places on consensus. I argue instead that Habermas's stress on consensus is genuine and first emerged in his early historical work on the public sphere, wherein he focused on an absolutist theory of consensus and relegated dissent to a marginal ancillary position from which he has never really recovered it. Had Habermas turned from Europe to early America, he could have found early public sphere theorists that were much more alive to the irreducible centrality of dissent. More importantly, if current theorists will return to this history they will be better able to understand a model of the dissentient public sphere (and its counterpublics) that lies between Habermasian consensus and post-modern agonism.

The Early American Public Sphere and the Emergence of a Black Print Counterpublic

LACK community and literary formation in the 178os and 1790s constitutes a distinctive intellectual history of the early Republic. Historians Joanne Pope Melish, Patrick Rael, Shane White, and Craig Steven Wilder have contributed to our understanding of the social, legal, and political histories of free blacks in the early national era. However, we have yet to understand how blacks theorized and enacted through print culture their presence in the early Republic. More than a decade ago, Michael Warner virtually dismissed the possibility of early black print culture in his landmark Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. For obvious reasons, historians know little about what colonial blacks thought about print, Warner wrote. The texts of Jupiter Hammon and Phillis Wheatley are the exceptions that prove the rule, since they define their public voices as white, even if only proleptically. They understand their literacy to prefigure their celestial assimilation. His account uncritically assumes the racialized structuring assumptions of the privileged public sphere he documents: that printing constituted and distinguished a specifically white community, that printed artifacts were property and thus inappropriate to blacks and Indians, and that Hammon, Wheatley, and other black authors who attempted to establish a print presence did so as an expression of desire for the privileges of whiteness.1

Two Cheers for the "Public Sphere"... and One for Historians' Skepticism

H ISTORIANS treat theory the way rattlesnakes approach small mammals. They either strike to kill or swallow whole. The latter often amounts to death by citation.1 Judging from the halting quality of the debate over the early American public sphere, amid what appears to be an increasing number of citations to Habermas, it might seem as if the theory (or is it a description? a model?) of the public sphere is half swallowed and half dead. A few sustained engagements aside, the public sphere serves historians mainly as a shorthand for the early Republic's expanding press and popular political culture or for the public as opposed to the private or domestic realm. This vague descriptive usage is quite different from Habermas's argument about institutions and their crucial alterationtheir democratization and their decline in critical capacity-between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Why have historians swallowed Habermas's definition and strangled his argument about change? One reason is that Habermas's account of transformation is a close cousin of modernization theory, albeit with an emphasis on forms of rational discourse. The emphasis on discourse itself, rational or not, made the concept seem like something quite new and perhaps threatening after the linguistic turn. Most historians have been content to leave such questions about institutions, democracy, and culture to sociologists of communication and political scientists who have been writing the most expansive accounts of modernization, democratization, and public life in eighteenthand nineteenth-century America. That they have drawn on historians' monographs to do so is either interdisciplinary progress or a lost opportunity in historical writing. When

Murderabilia

Murderabilia

Religious Pluralism in Twenty-First-Century America: Problematizing the Implications for Orthodoxy Christianity

This article aims to situate Orthodox Christianity within the context of American religious pluralism in the twenty-first century. It explores the role of Orthodox Christianity, as both subject and object, in the evolution of American religious identity, with particular focus on the domestic, international, and transnational factors that account for the locus of Orthodox Christianity in debates about the religious dimensions of collective identity in America. The article concludes that internal pluralization is redefining the identity and mission of Orthodox Christianity in America, such that the consolidation of a distinct type of American Orthodoxy may allow for a renegotiation of the place of Orthodox Christianity in the American public sphere in the twenty-first century.

Religious Pluralism in Twenty-First-Century America: Problematizing the Implications for Orthodoxy Christianity

This article aims to situate Orthodox Christianity within the context of American religious pluralism in the twenty-first century. It explores the role of Orthodox Christianity, as both subject and object, in the evolution of American religious identity, with particular focus on the domestic, international, and transnational factors that account for the locus of Orthodox Christianity in debates about the religious dimensions of collective identity in America. The article concludes that internal pluralization is redefining the identity and mission of Orthodox Christianity in America, such that the consolidation of a distinct type of American Orthodoxy may allow for a renegotiation of the place of Orthodox Christianity in the American public sphere in the twenty-first century.

Political "Articulation" in the Diaspora: Media, Language, and "Dialogue" in the Case of Arab-Americans

Political "Articulation" in the Diaspora:Media, Language, and "Dialogue" in the Case of Arab-Americans Christoph Schumann (bio) Introduction: Diaspora, Language and Translation In the December 1999 issue of the Arab-American magazine al-Hewâr, the Houston-based physician and community activist Dr. Abdel Kader Fustok described the need for dialogue among members of his diaspora as follows: If individuals were to commit to participate in dialogue and sustain it over a period of time, they would have a coherent movement of thought, not only at the conscious level that we all recognize, but more importantly at the tacit level, the unspoken level which cannot be described. If we think together in a coherent way, it would have tremendous power. (emphasis added) Statements like this about the link between power, politics, and communication are commonplace in publications of the Arab American community in the United States, for several reasons. As a minority in the United States, Arab-Americans feel that the mass media misrepresent their culture, heritage, and religion. Therefore, they think about ways to influence the American public sphere in order to correct this false image. As a diaspora community, most Arabs in the United States have strong emotional and political ties to their former homelands. Hence, they also seek to build channels of communication in order to maintain these links. In pursuit of these two goals, Arab-Americans feel the need for a strong community based on a common identity with collective goals and interests. This cannot be reached, however, without common media and other means of communication in which identities, goals, and purposes can be articulated and discussed. [End Page 307] In other words, Arab-Americans consider public communication crucial to the "empowerment" of their community. Yet it is their predicament to be situated at the margins of two national public spheres, that is, the publics of American society and of the Arab homelands. This situation is aggravated by the fact that these two publics operate in two different languages: English and Arabic. For this reason, processes of translation and reinterpretation are necessary for communication within the Arab-American community itself as well as between the community and both its Arab homelands and American society. With respect to individuals, language skills vary according to the history of immigration, the particular trajectories of socialization, and the level of education. However, for the communal media of diaspora groups, such as periodicals, the problem consists in more than just the (important) question of which language to choose for publishing and broadcasting. Besides the language, other differences such as ethnicity, ideology, and religion multiply the need for translation—within the community as well as between the community and its multiple social environments. Focusing on the Washington, DC–based magazine Al-Hewâr/ Arab-American Dialogue, this article analyzes the role of translation and the concept of "dialogue" for transcending differences of language, ethnicity, ideology, and religion. Of course, this single publication must not be taken to represent the Arab-American community as such. However, Al-Hewâr does tackle a number of issues crucial to the conception of Arab-Americans as a diaspora. Al-Hewâr, which began publication in April 1989, remains one of the few Arab-American periodicals that continue to publish in both English and Arabic, which is one of the reasons it was chosen for this study. As will be shown at greater length below, the title Al-Hewâr (meaning literally "dialogue") is programmatic in various ways. The concept of dialogue helps the publication to balance the peculiar triangle of diaspora politics: (1) to secure a place for the community in the country of residence, (2) to preserve the community's bonds to the homelands, and (3) to overcome the diversity within the community by searching for generally accepted concepts such as "Arabism" ('urûba), Islam, and citizenship. Theoretical and Methodological Implications Diaspora politics has become an issue in political science, particularly in the fields of international relations and security studies (e.g., Sheffer; Vertovec). Many studies of diasporic influence in international relations neglect the complexity of the external and internal relationships that diasporas must sustain, both inside the community and between the community and...

The Free and Open Press: The Founding of American Democratic Press Liberty, 1640-1800

The current, heated debates over hate speech and pornography were preceded by the equally contentious debates over the and open in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thus far little scholarly attention has been focused on the development of the concept of political press freedom even though it is a form of civil liberty that was pioneered in the United States. But the establishment of press liberty had implications that reached far beyond mere free speech. In this groundbreaking work, Robert Martin demonstrates that the history of the and open is in many ways the story of the emergence and first real expansions of the early American public sphere and civil society itself. Through a careful analysis of early libel law, the state and federal constitutions, and the Sedition Act crisis Martin shows how the development of constitutionalism and civil liberties were bound up in the discussion of the and open press. Finally, this book is a study of early American political thought and democratic theory, as seen through the revealing window provided by press liberty discourse. It speaks to broad audiences concerned with the public square, the history of the book, free press history, contemporary free expression controversies, legal history, and conceptual history.