American Wing Research Articles

The African Origin of Civilization curated by Alisa LaGamma and Diana Craig Patch; Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room curated by Hannah Beachler, Michelle Commander, Ian Alteveer, and Sarah E. Lawrence

The African Origin of Civilization curated by Alisa LaGamma and Diana Craig Patch; Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room curated by Hannah Beachler, Michelle Commander, Ian Alteveer, and Sarah E. Lawrence

Playing for Power: The European Worker Sport Movement and the Seeds of the American Labour Sports Movement, 1919-1940

In the late 1930s until the early 1950s, a large Labor Sports movement existed in the United States, especially in unions under the leadership of Socialists or Communists. I argue that it is impossible to understand the Labor Sports movement outside of this wider global context, because Labor Sports in the United States were directly linked to Worker Sport via both individuals and organizations. Indeed, Americans with knowledge of Worker Sport sought to establish similar institutions in the United States, even though the results were ultimately quite different. Labor Sports was inspired by Worker Sport, and so to understand the American Labor Sports, I will start with the European Worker Sport. American left-wing sports organizing prior to the rise of the CIO largely sought to create the American wing of Worker Sport, albeit with limited success.

Information Desk

148 | ROBYN SCHIFF Information Desk Robyn Schiff poetry ….There was a cart we used to transport brochures from a storage closet to the Desk. You had to steer it back through the Renaissance into a passage that opened in a dark medieval hallway through a door without a handle you backed into after opening one-handed with a key called the Number Two that was hanging from a ball link chain around your neck. We talk a lot about death, my husband and I. I want to add to the utter absence of the weight that once seemed everlasting of the child asleep upon me that I can feel not feeling, which is the overtaking void circumscribed exactly, the pressure at my nape of that ball link chain when I bent down to insert the key, ROBYN SCHIFF | 149 turned it, pushed the door open, and then the glimmering, insignificant beauty of the release of my neck as I withdrew key from lock, stood up, and entered. My mother swam in a man-made body called the Delta Reservoir near the Mohawk River outside Rome, New York that was the intentional result of the engineered flooding of a village called Delta that had been developed into something more than just acreage by two men named Stark and Prosper. You are an American Girl. Here you are in an American Poem getting in the American water. Let’s go under together. “I used to get nose bleeds from the pressure. I don’t know that I want to get in the poem—” There is a ladder. Itself a salvage. Let’s back down it slowly deep in the quiet American Wing of the Museum in darkness toward a new closet—not for storage but installed for public viewing, a woman’s wardrobe. Private, folded things, ironed, crisp as peeling an orange in sunlight. Lit like a refrigerator in a dream, with almost nothing in it, who can stand before it and not divest? Stark and Prosper. Starched and Proper. Sti≠ and Angry. Forced and entered. Sorted and counted. Stored and forgotten. A pull to bottom I associate with dream ending before awakening. Not “thoughtless”; beyond thinking. End-of-recording sound of the needle dragging the void. Why should I, we, be afraid? Human consciousness far predates me oiling the mahogany handrail with my mere presence. Rembrandt/ Not Rembrandt, 1995, was the first special exhibition I attended as museum employee; paced it with the proprietary edge of a paid informant. Submit everything to the binary. It had the sti≠, infrared soul of connoisseurship; Rembrandt/ 150 | ROBYN SCHIFF Not Rembrandt, that’s the question; posed it like a strobe with the typesetter’s solidus, the forward slash, a force field between who did and who did not make it, without that indecisive human “Or” Milton imposes between the given and the made— Eve withdrawing from Adam with such gardening tools as are yet rude, guiltless of fire had formed, or angels brought. Choose a side, poet, which is it—Eve or God who forged the hoe? Forgery, forgery, forgery, flash, flash, flash. I said to myself, if you have to ask… but I stood before each painting eating half-shadow, umber, and ocher every day for a month of lunch hours trying to know. “The handling of the built-up impasto is itself a valid argument against,” writes the curator, Walter Leidke in the exhibition catalog, and yet, a few paintings over—Portrait of a Man (The Auctioneer)—“it is surprising how ROBYN SCHIFF | 151 successful the unknown painter was at imitating Rembrandt’s manner in the light e≠ects on the sitter’s left cu≠….” And so I came to love that cu≠, its lace and dust, and loved the wrist that cu≠ suggests, obscured here in the painting by the ledger the auctioneer is holding on which the trembling value of what—some cows? suggests a field, in mind, where a calf moves in the shadow of a barn. The hot smell of manure and mulch. A bull. How much is it all worth? Self portrait of the young artist as auctioneer with your check list and radiant left cu≠ that...

Abbott Lowell Cummings, 1923–2017

Abbott Lowell Cummings, 1923–2017 Richard M. Candee (bio) Abbott Lowell Cummings, the first president of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, died on May 29, 2017, in Elaine Center at Hadley, Massachusetts. He was ninety-four. Instrumental in guiding the VAF during its formative years, he was best known outside our organization as the leading authority on seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century First Period architecture in the American northeast. He will long be remembered as the author of The Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay, 1625–1725, which won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award from the Society of Architectural Historians.1 Scholar, preservationist, and educator, he had a profound influence on many VAF members and others in the field of early American architecture, especially in his career as an outstanding teacher at Boston University, Yale University, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he mentored dozens of young scholars. As I was one of his first acolytes, Abbott asked me many years ago to memorialize his life and scholarship at the end of his long and distinguished career. Born in St. Albans, Vermont, on March 14, 1923, the son of a Congregational minister and sometimes supporter of Norman Thomas, Abbott spent much of his youth living with his beloved paternal grandmother in Southington, Connecticut. This old Yankee helped form his love of genealogy and an appreciation of New England's past. It was she, too, who gave him a membership in the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA) at age fifteen. The budding art historian was educated at Hoosac School in New York (1936–1941), Oberlin College (BA 1945, MA 1946), and Ohio State (PhD 1950), then one of the few universities offering advanced degrees in American architectural history. He quickly learned discretion in speaking of his research after Professor Henry Russell Hitchcock published Cummings's new discoveries on the design and building of the Greek Revival Ohio state capitol in 1948, without credit. From 1948 to 1951, Abbott taught at Antioch College, while finishing his critical study of Federal-era architectural pattern books by New England builder Asher Benjamin. He drew upon this early interest in Benjamin in later research and publications focused on design in nineteenth-century New England. Following his stint at Antioch, he served as assistant curator for the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until 1955, when he was hired as assistant director of SPNEA (now Historic New England) and editor of its journal, Old-Time New England. We met in 1962, when I was an Oberlin sophomore in a summer program at Historic Deerfield, and Abbott was leading a fast-paced tour of Boston's buildings (known as the "Death March") for the group. Given our mutual history at Oberlin he encouraged me to seek out his old professor, Clarence Ward, and urge him to give me a class on American architecture. This set me on my own career in architectural preservation. At Oberlin in September 1946, Abbott's master's thesis, "Documentary Histories of Seventeenth Century Houses in Massachusetts Bay" observed that stylistic consistency over the seventeenth century and a time lag for adopting new [End Page 1] design ideas "are confusing to the historian in his attempt to establish a system of dating for the houses of the seventeenth century." He carefully sifted through the documentary evidence of seventy houses in the Commonwealth (many of them no longer standing) with detailed notes on the condition and plan development for those still extant. This was followed—in typical Abbott Cummings fashion—by an appendix of ten building contracts and similar documents, and a full secondary bibliography. I mention this first exploration of what would become his favorite topic to show how long ago his work on Framed Houses actually began. Over the next thirty-four years Abbott continued his research about what really happened to the (mostly) surviving houses and what changes in structure or style occurred. This was complimented by his work at the American Wing, where he documented all of the New England period rooms that George Francis Dow helped install in the 1920s. Joining the SPNEA in 1955, Abbott was allowed one day a month for personal...

About the Authors

About the Authors

The Muslim Question in Canada: A History of Segmented Integration by Abdolmohammad Kazemipur

Reviewed by: Ali G. Dizboni, Royal Military College of CanadaCurrent debates on the Muslim presence in Canada are often security driven. The literature on issues such as radicalization, extremism, terrorism, public safety, counterterrorism, and cross-border security frames this presence in terms of its significance to Canadian national or social security. For example, the case studies included in the recent collection Religious Radicalization and Securitization in Canada and Beyond focus largely on Muslim groups.[1] Likewise, while the increasing corpus of legislation on immigration, public safety, and counterterrorism understandably avoids any reference to specific groups, the Muslim factor is the elephant in the room. By the same token, not only does religion play a major part in French and English works dealing with diversity, integration, and multiculturalism, but the Muslim component is salient in terms of its potential risks to peace, order, and good governance. This perceived Muslim exceptionalism in the West by no means derives from the fact that Muslim groups are the only or the most significant source of extremism and terrorism. In the United States, recent data shows that American right wing extremism has claimed more victims than Jihadist attacks and in Western Europe this gap is very close.[2] What makes this climate of mistrust even worse is that this security obsession with specific groups leads to a vicious cycle of securitization where the targeting of particular groups by public opinion, the media, and law enforcement leads to the stigmatization of an already marginalized group, thus ultimately increasing the risk of social segmentation and radicalization.Herein lies one of the most important contributions of Abdolmohammad Kazemipur's study, The Muslim Question in Canada . Inspired by a sociological rather than a philosophical approach, the author, a well-respected authority in the field, applies the insights of contact theory to the Muslim plight. Admitting that such a question exists, he disagrees with essentialists (or culturalists like Samuel Huntington) who believe that Islam by the very nature of its culture is incompatible with liberal democracy and that any solution would likely require total assimilation. Instead, Kazemipur maintains that the interactive and relational approach, which would involve strengthening economic and social connections, would work more efficiently and effectively toward integration.In the first of four sections following on a well laid-out introduction, the author examines the broad spectrum of views on integration and assesses their respective strengths and weaknesses in the Western context of socio-demographic encounters between Muslims and receiving societies. Part 2, heavily inspired by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, lays down the conceptual model of contact theory. …

The Fenians: Irish rebellion in the North Atlantic world, 1858-1876

Co-authors Patrick Steward and Bryan McGovern aim to revise our understanding of the Fenians, a transatlantic group of physical-force republican Irish nationalists in mid-nineteenth-century Great Britain and America. Steward and McGovern eschew interpretations of the Fenians as hopeless revolutionaries or maniacal terrorists. While they accept the portrayal by Irish historian Vincent Comerford of Fenianism as a means to sociability and professional networking for young men, the authors argue that Fenians also possessed “a legitimate desire to fight for Irish independence” (p. xiii). The Fenians attempts to demonstrate the sincere anti-British, nationalist convictions of Irish and Irish American (or “expatriate”) Fenians through a chronologically organized study of revolutionary activity in Great Britain, the United States, and Canada. The book succeeds admirably in delineating Fenianism’s origins and its course as a transatlantic revolutionary movement. Yet the authors are most concerned with explaining the movement’s failure to attract a broad base of support. As a result, their analysis at times focuses too much on what Fenian leaders might have done otherwise and not enough on the wider socio-economic, political, and ideological worlds inhabited by the Fenian rank and file. Among the greatest strengths of The Fenians is the authors’ attention to the difficulty of mobilizing a nationalist movement that existed across a variety of state structures. The first third of the book charts the rise and growth of Fenianism in Ireland and America between the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848 and the American Civil War, while the balance of the study navigates between Fenian plotting and activity in Ireland, England, the United States, and Canada. Drawing from the Fenian Papers in the Catholic University archives, Steward and McGovern reveal the incessant infighting and corruption among leaders of the Fenian Brotherhood (Fenianism’s American wing) and the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB; Fenians in Ireland), as well as the tensions between the two organizations. They also emphasize the relative freedom in which Irish American Fenians operated in comparison with their co-revolutionaries in Ireland. Yet, even in the United States, Fenians had to contend with politicians whose support for Irish nationalism ebbed and flowed with election cycles. It is remarkable, then, that thousands of Irish American Fenians rallied to invade Canada in 1866, and that an American ship—Erin’s Hope—laden with weapons and Irish American Civil War veterans sailed to Ireland in 1867 to aid in an Irish Republican Brotherhood insurrection. That both the Canadian invasions of 1866 and the combined Erin’s Hope expedition and IRB rebellion of 1867 failed does not detract from the authors’ contention that Fenians presented a genuine threat to the sovereignty of Great Britain, to the security of the British Empire, and to the diplomacy of the United States. Steward and McGovern use British and American

Things American: art museums and civic culture in the Progressive Era

List of Illustrations Introduction. Museums and Society Chapter 1. Progressive Connoisseurs: The Intellectual Origins of Education Reform in Museums Chapter 2. The De Forest Faction's Progressive Museum Agenda Chapter 3. The Educational Value of American Things: Balancing Usefulness and Connoisseurship Chapter 4. The Arts of Peace: World War I and Cultural Nationalism Chapter 5. The Art of Living: The American Wing and Public History Chapter 6. Americanism in Design: Industrial Arts and Museums Epilogue. Depression Modern: Institutional Sponsors and Progressive Legacies Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

The New American Wing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Following renovations lasting over a decade, an expanded and fully reconfigured American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was unveiled in early 2012. The Met’s American collection is vast, spanning from colonial to contemporary and including painting, sculpture, photography, and a wide variety of decorative arts. The chronological sweep of the American Wing is approximately 1700 to 1910, so visitors hoping to see the museum’s key works by Jackson Pollock or Jasper Johns must walk acros...

The American Wing Rooms in the Metropolitan Museum of Art

This article chronicles the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s commitment, beginning in 1910, to the concept of displaying American art in period rooms. After a century of accumulation and refinement, the series of twenty complete historic interiors (together with four partial ones) now displayed in chronological order within the American Wing represents a remarkably comprehensive and authentic survey of American domestic architecture.

Ambivalence, Irony, and Americana

AbstractThis article examines the canvases and photographs made by Charles Sheeler between 1926 and 1939 of his own collection of Shaker furniture, hooked rugs, and nineteenth-century ceramics. It argues that the paintings possess modernist self-consciousness, ambivalence, and irony toward their historical subject matter and that they critique the contemporary collecting fad for all things Americana. The article sets Sheeler’s paintings in the context of the Metropolitan Museum’s American Wing and the writings of Holger Cahill and Edward and Faith Andrews and argues that an ambivalent, ironical attitude pervaded much of the early scholarship on these artifacts.

Lessons in History: The Reinstallation of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Lessons in History: The Reinstallation of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Reinventing the American Wing

Previous articleNext article No AccessReinventing the American Wing The Detroit Institute of ArtsKenneth John Myers Kenneth John Myers Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Art Volume 24, Number 2Summer 2010 Sponsored by the Smithsonian American Art Museum Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/656454 Views: 26Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

John Townsend, Newport Cabinetmaker (review)

Reviewed by: John Townsend, Newport Cabinetmaker Jay Robert Stiefel (bio) John Townsend, Newport Cabinetmaker. By Morrison H. Heckscher with the assistance of Lori Zabar. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 225. Illustrations. Cloth, $75.00.) John Townsend was a perfectionist. His elegant and restrained furniture was constructed from the choicest mahogany by methods so refined that reinforcement and precision were lavished even on internal areas not [End Page 670] visible in the finished article. A fifth-generation American and third-generation Newporter, Townsend "lived his life below the level of historical scrutiny," with the only documentary record of his existence being his will, probate inventory, some sparse business records, and an occasional reference to his holding public office (51). His signed and often dated pieces, thirty-four extant at last count, have helped to preserve his legacy. Townsend's accomplishments have now been chronicled in a work as fastidiously crafted as his own. John Townsend, Newport Cabinetmaker complements the exhibition of his furniture held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005. Both are the creation of Morrison H. Heckscher, chair of its American Wing. The work compiles recent scholarship about Townsend, offers new interpretations, and assembles them in a narrative format accessible to both layman and expert. Heckscher's catalogue illustrates "all known documented examples of John Townsend's furniture" with full-page, precisely lit, color photographs, often with smaller images highlighting design, construction and, where present, signatures and labeling (73). Each catalogue entry is sparsely written. Measurements, provenance, and bibliographic references are provided; but there are no condition reports, unlike in Heckscher's earlier classic, American Furniture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Scholars' appetites will be otherwise sated by the detailed appendices. Preceding the catalogue are the historical chapters, which are interspersed with images of furniture that introduce the reader to the work of Townsend and his contemporaries. After an initial chapter that pays homage to earlier researchers and summarizes their contributions, Heckscher describes Newport's position within the constellation of colonial American woodworking centers, particularly Boston. Heckscher believes that the "independent course" chartered by Newporters in renouncing the Puritan leadership of the Massachusetts Bay Colony is evidenced in their furniture design. "Boston innovation," according to Heckscher, was "transformed into something altogether richer and more memorable" by Newport joiners (17–18). While not disputing this achievement in furniture design, it is fair to observe that Newport never fully departed from the baroque influences received from Boston. Indeed, the very persistence of Newport's furniture designs, such as the block-and-shell bureau tables that Townsend produced starting c. 1760, seems decidedly retardaire in the 1790s. Newport neither developed the variety of Boston's blockfront designs [End Page 671] nor adopted the rococo influences popular in other American furniture-making centers, such as Philadelphia. Townsend's signed pieces have the following in common: "[A] fully developed form, a crispness and sharpness of design, a precision of execution, inside and out, and a preference for complex, labor-intensive methods of construction. They are the work of a passionate perfectionist, constitutionally unable to cut corners or economize even in places that cannot be seen" (52). He was a specialist in certain "elaborate and costly" forms. His signing and dating of these pieces establishes their chronology and, according to Heckscher, demonstrate that Townsend "exhibited a self-conscious sense of his own place in the history of cabinetmaking that is unique in the annals of American cabinetmaking" (56). This interpretation of Townsend's motive in labeling his work is one of the most intriguing claims in Heckscher's book, and one of its most problematic. However "self-conscious" Heckscher may suppose Townsend to have been about his stature in cabinetmaking history, there is nothing "unique" about American joiners and cabinetmakers signing and even dating their work. By way of example, substantial bodies of signed and dated work survive for Townsend's contemporaries John Shaw of Annapolis and Benjamin Frothingham of Charlestown, Massachusetts. Another Charlestown cabinetmaker, Jacob Forster, expedited the process by utilizing labels printed with incomplete dates (e.g., "179_"), allowing him to fill in the last digit as...

Picture Houses and Period Rooms: Wallace Nutting, the Museum, and the Market

The period rooms installed by Wallace Nutting (1861–1941) at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, provide a paradigm for the study of the relationship between the museum and the market. The acquisition of the entrepenurial minister's collection of early American furniture by the venerable New England institution not only served the needs of the museum by providing an “American Wing” for the community, but the transaction also buttressed Nutting's reputation as a connoisseur and added value to his antimodern business empire. Nutting's domestic interiors lent institutional authority to his photography, writings, and reproduction furniture business, and enabled his growing stature as a popular historian and cultural critic.

Style and Lifestyle in the Machine Age: The Modernist Period Rooms of “The Architect and the Industrial Arts”

In its phenomenally popular 1929 exhibition “The Architect and the Industrial Arts,” the Metropolitan Museum of Art used the period room type of display to showcase modern designs for the home and workplace. This article traces a three-part genealogy of the Metropolitan's installation design, which derived from displays of modern furnishings in New York department stores, modernist movie sets, and the American Wing period rooms at the museum itself. The article argues that despite the modern style of the designs on display, the exhibition, through its installation architecture, actually promoted a conservative, backward-looking lifestyle governed by establishment taste and traditional gender identities.

The Exhibition of Unlacquered Silverat the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The desire to inhibit the rate of tarnishing of silver objects has often led to their surfaces being coated with a lacquer or varnish; however, there are occasions when such a treatment would be inappropriate, either placing the object at risk physically or inhibiting the visual perception of its surfaces. Both concerns have been operative at the Metropolitan Museum of Art over the course of the last 25 years and have resulted in the implementation of several different approaches to the display of unlacquered silver. In each instance, these efforts were stimulated by the installation of different parts of the museum's collections, initially in the American Wing, followed by the Byzantine treasure from Attarouthi, and most recently, the medieval department's Early Christian and Byzantine silver. A common goal throughout has been to minimize the effects of gaseous pollutants on the silver by creating “clean” vitrines or storage cabinets, and then integrating into these spaces either passive or active systems to further reduce the levels of possible contaminants. The specifications for the vitrines and the techniques used for diminishing the gaseous pollutants evolved internally in conjunction with a growing body of research in preventive conservation focused on identifying both the harmful materials within exhibition and storage environments and the means by which a more benign environment might be achieved. A review of the decision- making which governed these various installations reveals a common approach which took into account a greater understanding of the dynamics of silver corrosion, and the introduction of new materials and methodologies with greater effectiveness in the adsorption of gaseous pollutants. The description of successes and failures in the implementation phase may benefit those faced with similar concerns in the exhibition of their collections.

Different cell size and cell number contribution in two newly established and one ancient body size cline of Drosophila subobscura.

Latitudinal genetic clines in body size occur in many ectotherms including Drosophila species. In the wing of D. melanogaster, these clines are generally based on latitudinal variation in cell number. In contrast, differences in wing area that evolve by thermal selection in the laboratory are in general based on cell size. To investigate possible reasons for the different cellular bases of these two types of evolutionary response, we compared the newly established North and South American wing size clines of Drosophila subobscura. The new clines are based on latitudinal variation in cell area in North America and cell number in South America. The ancestral European cline is also based on latitudinal variation in cell number. The difference in the cellular basis of wing size variation in the American clines, which are roughly the same age, together with the similar cellular basis of the new South American cline and the ancient European one, suggest that the antiquity of a cline does not explain its cellular basis. Furthermore, the results indicate that wing size as a whole, rather than its cellular basis, is under selection. The different cellular bases of different size clines are most likely explained either entirely by chance or by different patterns of genetic variance--or its expression--in founding populations.

Plots and proposals: American women's fiction, 1850-90

'Boy meets girl. Boy proposes to girl. Girl refuses proposal. Then what? This provocative scenario provides the frame for a significant counter tradition in popular nineteenth-century women's novels: the double-proposal plot, in which the heroine rejects and later accepts proposals from the same suitor. Exploring the American wing of this movement through the novels of Carolyn Hentz, Augusta Evans, Laura J. Curtis Bullard, E. D. E. N. Southworth, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Karen Tracey investigates how each of these writers is constrained by her historical circumstances and how she uses her fiction to critique those circumstances'.'Pioneered in Britain by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bront, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the double-proposal plot dislodges the myth of Mr. Right and questions the all-powerful notions of true love and happily-ever-after. When the heroine rejects her suitor's initial proposal, she opens up the possibility of renegotiating the terms of the relationship and exploring alternative roles'.' By considering two possible marriages between the same set of partners, the double-proposal plot interrogates the role of middle-class women in courtship and in public life as well as the quality of married life and the influence a woman potentially brings to it. Tracey charts the genre's evolution from novels that seek answers within renegotiated marriages to those that challenge the efficacy of marriage itself. Reconstructing some of the cultural circumstances that would have influenced the writing, publishing, and reading of the novels, Plots and Proposals examines how changing notions of love and romance both inform and are critiqued by this renegade fiction'.

`On Me, Not in Me'

Throughout the 1980s, the American right wing attempted to control the field of social politics and social policy through a rhetoric of `family'. In response, the left, including much of the lesbian and gay movement, abandoned an early, theorized antipathy to family, attempting to recapture the political field with ideas like `alternative families' and `families we chose'. These moves do not sufficiently account for the hidden glue that binds bodies to politics, national or anti-national. The glue, or, as Benedict Anderson calls it, `political love' is no longer an affect to be rejected but a `feeling' to be embraced. Examining the case of sexual abstinence in early right-wing AIDS discourse and in current websites, this article suggests that micro-politics of love are inextricable from macro-politics of nationalism.