American Spaces Research Articles

Vicios privados, virtudes públicas: ingresos fiscales de la Real Hacienda de Chile a fines del periodo colonial

This article deals with the evolution and financing of the Royal Treasury of Chile in the last colonial decades, through reports prepared by accountants of the Contadurías Mayores of this Capitanía and Peru. The resultsshow that the growth of the Chilean treasury was explained both by the good economic performance and by the fiscal measures derived from the reforms undertaken, especially after the adoption of the Ordenanzas de Intendentes (1786-1787). As a consequence, the Chilean royal treasury increased through an ever-increasing collection of direct contributions, in contrast to other Hispanic American spaces where those indirect ones marked the course of the hacienda. Although without dispensing with the regressive fiscal component, as confirmed by the 40 % that the set of taxes that levied the entrenched consumption of «vices» among the chilean populatio

American Spaces and Places and the Myth of the Serial Killer: Netflix’s Mindhunter (2017–19)

American Spaces and Places and the Myth of the Serial Killer: Netflix’s <i>Mindhunter</i> (2017–19)

Experience of Out-of-Placeness in Diane Glancy's The Reason for Crows

With the theory of Moss and Dyck, this study discusses Diane Glancy's The Reason for Crows to understand the insinuations of sensuous geography. This study maintains how in the wake of out-of-place identity within Native American space, Glancy uses sensory experiences as material practices to counter a sense of out-of-placeness. Such multisensory experiences help her native characters locate themselves in both the textual and Native American space. This study explores Diane Glancy's The Reason for Crows not only to find out the reasons due to which the Native Americans develop an acute sense of out-of-placeness within Native American spaces but also the geographies of illness and disability to investigate how Native Americans create and contest their space and place.

From representation to engagement: how have museums supported US cultural diplomacy?

ABSTRACT American museums were great supporters and partners for cultural diplomacy during the Cold War and concurrently expanded their expertise into the area of cultural relations. In the post-9/11 era, with the rise of soft power and new public diplomacy, there have been changes in the added expectations for museums’ role in cultural diplomacy to move more toward the community engagement model from the traditional exhibit-oriented model. This research studies the historical overview of museums’ efforts in cultural diplomacy and investigates the changes in directions and actors’ dynamics through two cases from the Department of State: the American Spaces program and Museums Connect. The study confirms museums are the producers of soft power for cultural diplomacy and cultural relations and demonstrates how new museology and new public diplomacy created synergy for the public-private partnership and achieves the goals of both governmental and nongovernmental actors in cultural diplomacy.

Multiethnic Asian American Identities in Asian American Spaces

This paper seeks to address the ways in which multiethnic Asian American voices have been marginalized in Asian American spaces. I conducted interviews with three participants who self identify as multiethnic Asian Americans and discuss how language, phenotypic features, and family play a role in the multiethnic Asian American experience.

Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond’s Historic Cemeteries by Ryan K. Smith

Reviewed by: Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond’s Historic Cemeteries by Ryan K. Smith Joy M. Giguere (bio) Keywords Cemeteries, Richmond, Virginia, Race, Historical memory Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond’s Historic Cemeteries. By Ryan K. Smith. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. Pp. 316. Paper, $34.95.) With the profusion of new publications on cemeteries and landscapes of memory, public monuments and memorials, patterns of care for and disposal of human remains, and historic preservation, it would be an under-statement to say that the study of American commemorative culture has flowered in recent years. Jeffrey Smith’s The Rural Cemetery Movement: Places of Paradox in Nineteenth Century America (Lanham, MD, 2017), James Cothran and Erica Danylchak’s Grave Landscapes: The Nineteenth-Century Rural Cemetery Movement (Columbia, SC, 2018), Thomas J. Brown’s Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2019), and Till Death Do Us Part: American Ethnic Cemeteries as Borders Uncrossed (Jackson, MS, 2020), edited by Allan Amanik and Kami Fletcher, are just a handful of new works that testify to the current recognition among historians of how the treatment and memorialization of the dead provide a deeper understanding of the social and cultural dynamics of the living over time and space. Ryan K. Smith’s Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond’s Historic Cemeteries adds significantly to the depth of this recent explosion in public interest and scholarship by providing a focused study of cemeteries located in Richmond, Virginia. Examining roughly twenty burying grounds that Smith regards as “the largest or most instructive” (10) for understanding the social, religious, and racial dynamics of Richmond’s history, Death and Rebirth in a Southern City is as much a meditation on broader historical and contemporary trends concerning the creation, maintenance, and preservation of burying grounds in urban centers across the nation as it is a work of local history. Breaking with traditional patterns of cemetery-related scholarship that often focus on a single cemetery (or type of cemetery) or time period, Smith provides what could best be described as extended biographies of Richmond’s major burial sites, wherein he analyzes these spaces as reflections [End Page 710] of the values, power dynamics, and struggles of the living communities they served as much as they functioned as repositories for the dead. Addressed in eight thematic and roughly chronological chapters, these burying grounds include historically white spaces such as St. John’s Churchyard (est. 1741), Shockoe Hill Cemetery (est. 1822), and Hollywood Cemetery (est. 1847); African American spaces such as the African Burial Ground (est. 1700s), the Barton Heights Cemeteries (est. 1815), Evergreen Cemetery (est. 1891), and East End Cemetery (est. 1897); the Jewish Hebrew Cemetery (est. 1816) and Sir Moses Montefiore Cemetery (est. 1886); and cemeteries where both Black and white burials took place, such as the city-owned Oakwood Cemetery (est. 1854) and Richmond National Cemetery (est. 1866). Regarding the broad temporal parameters of his book, Smith explains in his introduction, “since general studies of cemeteries have rarely bridged their subjects’ origins with the dynamics of their modern preservation, this book attempts to forward a model here” (10). Smith thus provides a dynamic new framework for future cemetery scholarship, for by examining the deeper history of the creation and evolution of Richmond’s burying grounds, he is not just considering the changing patterns of care for and disposal of the dead or the evolution in cemetery aesthetics. Rather, by pushing his gaze to the present, Smith ably charts the history of urban development in Richmond and how this reflects the broader patterns of segregation and ongoing marginalization of the African American community despite the gains of the civil rights movement and burial desegregation in the late 1960s. Such patterns appear in stark relief with the historical trajectory of white burying grounds. Even in Smith’s chapter on Jewish cemeteries, he illustrates how, despite their religious distinctiveness and at times marginalization from the dominant Christian community, the ability of these cemeteries to withstand the forces of urban development and their survival as dynamic and useful spaces for the dead is a testament to how collective whiteness transcended...

The American Film Musical and the Place(less)ness of Entertainment: Cabaret’s “International Sensation” and American Identity in Crisis

This article looks at cosmopolitanism in the American film musical through the lens of the genre’s self-reflexivity. By incorporating musical numbers into its narrative, the musical mirrors the entertainment industry mise en abyme, and establishes an intrinsic link to America through the act of (cultural) performance. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope and its recent application to the genre of the musical, I read the implicitly spatial backstage/stage duality overlaying narrative and number—the musical’s dual registers—as a means of challenging representations of Americanness, nationhood, and belonging. The incongruities arising from the segmentation into dual registers, realms complying with their own rules, destabilize the narrative structure of the musical and, as such, put the semantic differences between narrative and number into critical focus. A close reading of the 1972 film Cabaret, whose narrative is set in 1931 Berlin, shows that the cosmopolitanism of the American film musical lies in this juxtaposition of non-American and American (at least connotatively) spaces and the self-reflexive interweaving of their associated registers and narrative levels. If metalepsis designates the transgression of (onto)logically separate syntactic units of film, then it also symbolically constitutes a transgression and rejection of national boundaries. In the case of Cabaret, such incongruities and transgressions eventually undermine the notion of a stable American identity, exposing the American Dream as an illusion produced by the inherent heteronormativity of the entertainment industry. The film advocates a cosmopolitan model of cultural hybridity and the plurality of identities by shedding light on the faultlines of nationalist essentialism.

Lila Corwin Berman.Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit.

Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit is a wonderful example of a “minority history” that illustrates how the group in question, in this case Jews, was more than merely an interesting sidebar to the “mainstream” American historical narrative. Instead, they were integral to this story as they participated in the construction and implementation of liberal urban policies. Between the end of World War II and the 1970s, Jews engaged with and invested in Detroit, Michigan, in order to preserve and improve Jewish neighborhoods encountering urban transformations like black in-migration and Jewish out-migration. Lila Corwin Berman argues that the city remained important to postwar Jews’ cultural, political, historical, and spiritual identity despite their ever more suburban location and their former neighborhoods’ transformation into increasingly African American spaces. To do this, Berman studies both the physical and imagined city in Detroit, which she calls a “typical” (20) city since suburban Jews had similar experiences elsewhere. Detroit Jews’ urban involvement was rooted in what Berman calls “liberal” beliefs that combined a progressive social agenda about fairness for individuals, including freedom from discrimination, with a classically liberal economic model that included protections for the free market and individual choice.

War Echoes: Gender and Militarization in U.S. Latina/o Cultural Production

Warfare, Ariana E. Vigil argues, is “a significant catalyst for social, political, and artistic developments” (3). Without obscuring the devastating effects of armed conflict, War Echoes: Gender and Militarization in U.S. Latina/o Cultural Production shows how histories of US state violence and ongoing processes of militarization reverberate through Latina/o cultural productions and inspire creative strategies for forging collective identities and transnational solidarity. In this literary cultural studies project, Vigil approaches the texts in her archive not as static “products” to be comfortably consumed but as dynamic “productions” in which artists and audiences join in a “continual process of creating and enacting” (7). She situates these war narratives with respect to particular cultural and political contexts to “offer a more complex account of the ways U.S. Latinas/os have participated in, protested against, and formed relationships with U.S. militarism” (2). By placing gender and sexuality at the center of her analysis, she understands these texts as “vehicles for thinking about” the linkages between oppressive state regimes, heteropatriarchal nationalisms, and intimate relations (21). In her introduction, Vigil describes her archive as providing a “glocal” perspective. She positions her work as building on the traditions of transnational Latina feminism and transnational feminist literary and cultural studies (8); yet, she takes issue with what she perceives as the failure of transnational approaches to address the interplay between local experiences and global structures (5). Glocal, she believes, allows her to advance a multi-scalar analysis of everyday life’s entanglement with political and economic realities while also attending to the militarized regulation of race, gender, and sexuality in different US Latina/o and Latin American spaces. In doing so, she not only answers the call for a transnational Latina/o studies that engages how US Latina/o identities are “a consequence of U.S. militarism and neoliberalism” (10) but also resists the

“The happy effects of these waters”: Colonial American Mineral Spas and the British Civilizing Mission

Although colonial American spaces of genteel leisure like taverns, theaters, and coffeehouses have recently received considerable scholarly attention, mineral spas have largely eluded historical analysis. Those historians who have studied colonial spas have primarily used these spaces to uncover the roots of American republicanism, technological development, and changing perceptions of early modern cleanliness. But America’s mineral waters have more to reveal. In particular, these supposedly healing waters provide important insights into British imperialists’ efforts at mediating seemingly contradictory notions of civilization and wilderness. While a significant body of literature has shown that Europeans altered the natural world around them for personal gain, their interaction with mineral springs demonstrates how these imperialists adjusted themselves, as well as the environment, to suit their ideals of bodily health, scientific advancement, and imperial development. Thus, while mineral springs became key spaces to exploit both the natural world and Native American assets, the waters also became part of a larger civilizing mission dependent upon Europeans’ ability to modify their own principles and thrive in a strange New World.

What We Talk about When We Talk about American Space, or, Criticism Called and Wants Its Stuff Back

US exceptionalism is a matter of politics and ideology. To write those words for an audience of American literature scholars feels a bit like calling the ocean salty or Double Indemnity (1944), a film noir. My next sentence is equally uncontroversial: exceptionalism is also, and fundamentally so, a matter of space. In the aftermath of the centuries-long process of mythifying, exploring, pillaging, and colonizing the American frontier, envisioning any space as endless, fecund, and liberating is tantamount to calling it America. For most of us, imagining the US this way sets us immediately to pondering the promise of exceptionalism, where hard labor and rugged individualism guarantee success, both for the citizen and for the democracy. Its champions treat exceptionalism as something nearly as concrete as the mountains and the prairies, even the foamy white oceans themselves. I begin this way to introduce a curious turn taken by recent discussions of American spaces, and what makes them American, in literature and cinema. Critics of US exceptionalism can no more ignore the discursive hold it has on American space than can its proponents. But while scholars of US history, culture, and literature often present exceptionalism as ideology ripe for the dismantling, it's fair to say that as scholars, we assume the white and Anglo experience of the US to be so thoroughly permeated with exceptionalism that, as a kind of intellectual shorthand, we proceed as though it were something baked into the US as a nation and even as a topographical phenomenon.

“The ghosts of departed cook-maids looked wonderingly on”: Specters of Servitude in Nathaniel Hawthorne'sThe House of the Seven Gables

In his remarks on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, D.H. Lawrence quips, "No ghost could stand up against a vacuum cleaner" (104). Lawrence's implication that the ghosts of the Pyncheons' ancestral estate would be antedated by household appliances explicitly connects the performance of domestic labor with supernatural hauntings. This association between domestic labor and the novel's spectral presences is later echoed in Gillian Brown's seminal work, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (1991), which argues that, "[w]hat haunts the House of the Seven Gables" are "not only the sins of the fathers but also the disembodiments of the present, the ghosts of feminine labor" (81). While Brown's intriguing study draws attention to Hawthorne's use of domestic ideologies, no scholar has yet analyzed the portrayal of domestic servants in The House of the Seven Gables. Domestic servants haunt the periphery of the novel, and Hawthorne's romance is mired in contemporary anxieties about the so-called "servant problem." The narrative thus participates in the cultural work of domestic literature by engaging with nineteenth-century anxieties regarding the ambiguous social status of domestic servants and their employers within a democratic but slave-owning nation. Ultimately, Hawthorne exposes the oppressive nature of domestic work by connecting servants to the spectral in The House of the Seven Gables-, however, his critique is limited by his prejudices as a middleclass employer. Thus, while acknowledging the servant problem, The House of the Seven Gables also reflects frustration at the proposed methods to correct what employers saw as a flawed system that failed to provide them with competent, complaisant domestics. Amy Schrager Lang identifies the eponymous estate of Hawthorne's romance as "the locus of a conflict between wealth and poverty, prominence and obscurity, that unresolved and apparently unresolvable, binds generation after generation of Pyncheons and Maules to one another" (33). While Lang's analysis focuses primarily on the conflict between middle-class domesticity and the "new social order" of the capitalist "laboring man," this essay will focus on the conflict that occurred within the home itself--the nineteenth-century skirmish between the serving and the served (33). After an introduction to the reoccurring image of the ghostly servant in the fiction, I will explore the racial and class anxieties of the "servant problem," which Hawthorne saw in his own personal and domestic life and which are interwoven in the narrative of The House of the Seven Gables. My analysis also draws on cultural historians' accounts of domestic service, as well as on nineteenth-century domestic service manuals, which I posit are texts that should not be considered merely as repositories of cultural practices as they were typically performed, but rather as useful records of a culture's domestic ideologies and aspirations. (1) While these manuals proffer possible solutions to the servant problem, their potential strategies for overcoming employer/servant tensions are, we will see, ultimately undercut by the novel's pessimism. Hawthorne exposes the oppressed ghosts of servant and slave laborers haunting American domestic spaces, but offers no possibility of a national exorcism. The haunting of the Pyncheon house by the unrecognized labor of the family's domestic servants is made manifestly clear in the novel when Phoebe, in Chapter VII, begins to make a simple Indian corn cake. The narrator speculates, Perchance, amid their proper element of smoke, which eddied forth from the ill-constructed chimney, the ghosts of departed cook-maids looked wonderingly on, or peeped down the great breadth of the flue, despising the simplicity of the projected meal, yet ineffectually pining to thrust their shadowy hands into each inchoate dish. (2:99) Despite his facetious tone, the narrator's description of the "ghosts of departed cook-maids" contains hints of smoky, unpleasant working conditions and difficult culinary preparations, a troubled domesticity much different from the idealized housewifery performed by Phoebe. …

Book Review: Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces

Book Review: Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces

Tempest in the Andes? Part 1: Agrarian Reform and Peasant Differentiation in Cotopaxi (Ecuador)

This paper, published in two parts, contains an analysis of the links between the ‘agrarian question’ in the Ecuadorian Andes and the creation of a network of indigenous‐peasant organizations that became the backbone of the national indigenous movement. Based on a monographic study in the province of Cotopaxi, in Ecuador's central sierra, I explore the relations between agrarian and social change. I analyse the agrarian roots of Andean ethnic platforms at the local level, attempting to see how those processes that politicized ethnicity came about between the 1960s and the first decade of the twenty‐first century. Beginning with the redistributive results of the state‐driven agrarian reform (1964–73), the paper demonstrates that the articulation of the contemporary indigenous movement cannot be explained without an understanding of the implications that the reform process entailed and the synergies it unleashed, amongst these being an increase in the internal differentiation of the peasantry until then subject to the power of large estate owners. Throughout this process, the leaders, authentic organic intellectuals, played a fundamental role, picking up the reins of the organizations, weaving their own political discourse and becoming independent of their external allies. In a second stage, the NGOs and cooperation agencies that focused their attention on the indigenous world made organizational strengthening a banner of their work on the ground, consolidating that structural transformation. In this paper, I explore the deep roots of the agrarian system's political economy in order to come to a full understanding of the social differentiation process and the ethnicization of the peasant movement. This contributes towards the comparative reflection of other scenarios in the Andean region and, in general, of those Latin American spaces characterized by the presence of significant contingents of indigenous‐peasant populations.

Harley‑Davidson on Polish Roads: the Mythical Aspects of Automotive Fascination

Harley‑Davidson is one of the most recognizable brands of automotive products. The brand is saturated with mythical meanings which include defiance, rebellion, adventure and the desire for limitless freedom. Harley‑Davidson is also a synonym of America – the motorcycle was created to make a “trip of a lifetime or a groundbreaking journey of purification,” and open American spaces are the necessary condition for fulfilling this myth. In Poland, the myth of Harley‑Davidson is also carefully cherished by enthusiasts, for whom Harley‑Davidson is much more than just a motorcycle. This text is an attempt to analyze the functioning of the Harley myth in Poland. Some texts of Polish culture using the Harley‑Davidson will be discussed as well as forms of practical implementation of Harley‑Davidson passion (H‑D clubs, rallies, etc.).

Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces

Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces

American Spaces of Conversion: The Conductive Imaginaries of Edwards, Emerson, and James. By Andrea Knutson. New York: Oxford University Press. 2011. ix + 188 pp. $71.50 cloth.

American Spaces of Conversion: The Conductive Imaginaries of Edwards, Emerson, and James. By Andrea Knutson. New York: Oxford University Press. 2011. ix + 188 pp. $71.50 cloth.

An American Body/Politic: A Deleuzian Approach / American Spaces of Conversion: The Conductive Imaginaries of Edwards, Emerson, and James / Love’s Whipping Boy: Violence and Sentimentality in the American Imagination / Revolutionary Deists: Early America’s Rational Infidels

An American Body/Politic: A Deleuzian Approach / American Spaces of Conversion: The Conductive Imaginaries of Edwards, Emerson, and James / Love’s Whipping Boy: Violence and Sentimentality in the American Imagination / Revolutionary Deists: Early America’s Rational Infidels

“We're Going to Have to Cut Loose Some of Our Personal Beliefs”: Barriers and Opportunities in Providing HIV Prevention to African American Men who have Sex with Men and Women

In the United States, there is an urgent need to provide HIV prevention services to African American men who have sex with men and women (MSMW) but who do not identify as gay or homosexual. Engaging these men in HIV prevention has historically been challenging. This study used qualitative methodology to explore the beliefs and experiences from community-based service providers (n = 21) and from African American MSMW (n = 21) regarding the provision of HIV prevention education and counseling to these men. Data analysis revealed that (a) African American MSMW who do not identify as gay can challenge service providers' assumptions about sexual behavior and sexual identity; (b) service providers' attitudes toward these men can be affected by ambivalent or negative beliefs that pervade the general community; (c) African American MSMW need safe and nonjudgmental spaces that offer HIV risk reduction, but they also might experience anxiety about disclosing same-sex behaviors to counselors. Findings highlighted the complexities related to culture, masculinity, and sexuality as determinants of HIV risk in African American MSMW, and findings also revealed tensions between these factors that may affect the quality of HIV prevention services. Service providers may need additional training to provide appropriate and non-judgmental HIV prevention counseling and education.

Becoming Farmers: Opening Spaces for Women's Resource Control in Calakmul, Mexico

Despite empirical findings on women's varied and often extensive participation in smallholder agriculture in Latin America, their participation continues to be largely invisible. In this article, I argue that the intransigency of farming women's invisibility reflects, in part, a discursive construction of farmers as men. Through a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods, including interviews with one hundred women in Calakmul, Mexico, I demonstrate the material implications of gendered farmer identities for women's control of resources, including land and conservation and development project resources. In particular, I relate the activities of one women's agricultural community-based organization and the members' collective adoption of transgressive identities as farmers. For these women, the process of becoming farmers resulted in increased access to and control over resources. This empirical case study illustrates the possibility of women's collective action to challenge and transform women's continued local invisibility as agricultural actors in rural Latin American spaces.