Americanization Of Europe Research Articles

To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice and African American Authorship by Elizabeth McHenry

Reviewed by: To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice and African American Authorship by Elizabeth McHenry Riti Sharma Elizabeth McHenry. To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice and African American Authorship. Duke UP, 2021, ix + 238 pp. It takes courage to write, and even greater courage to see oneself as part of a literary history. Elizabeth McHenry bases To Make Negro Literature on this premise. McHenry also reveals what it took for African American authors to make it in the publishing industry. To Make Negro Literature offers a rich and variegated approach to the method of reading literary history. One of the ways McHenry highlights is through the relationships and correspondences between authors, publishers, and other authors. This is identified toward the end of the book as a network of underground channels, which is visible to the naked eye. The book is a response to the question of how Black literature came into being, and the travails that people went through to create their places in the publishing industry in America and Europe. McHenry not only charts the contributions of writers who resided in America, but also takes into consideration correspondences between African Americans in Europe and how such correspondence can be viewed as part of African American literary history. The introduction itself stresses the complex literary landscape in which African Americans created their works of art in a bid to challenge stereotypes, racism, and fascism. The author explains that the word Negro with an uppercase N, as opposed to that with a lowercase n, was considered a word of dignity. This makes one ponder what strength a community may derive from reinterpreting remarks and words meant to be derogatory. To alter the flow of thought and perception is what most African American authors and public figures did, and McHenry provides a granular image of this history with the help of a few memorable figures. The first chapter explores education through self-learning—how average African Americans educated themselves with the help of books, instead of school. Formal schooling was in many cases a dream deferred, owing to responsibilities and the racially charged climate. The fixed, immobile site of education such as the Atlanta Exposition's Negro Building was replaced by a mobile and flexible form of literacy through books such as William Crogman's Progress of a Race. The chapter gives the publishing history of this book, the context in which it was created and disseminated, and how it performed the task of bringing literacy to a large portion of the American population. Now, McHenry points out that dissemination attested to a fact of racial pride and dignity, which aided in the sale of the books. This [End Page 179] allows one to analyze the logic behind subscription book selling that is situated on the premise of a personal relationship and respect for the buyer from the seller's side. Ultimately, owning a copy of Progress of a Race was a mark of self-respect. McHenry therefore establishes that the connection readers make with books is not only with the literary artefacts themselves but also with the politics of reception of a given work. Progress of a Race offered every reader a chance to engage with the politics of being Black in America and to understand the nuances in which identities can be formed. This chapter showcases Crogman's journey from the Liberal Arts Building in Chicago, the Negro Building in Atlanta, to the site of the book. The material being forged showed the progress from literacy to the literary, which entailed a deeper understanding of textual politics. McHenry argues that the concept of education herein shifted from the idea of being literate to the values one attaches to the process of reading. The second chapter details books that enabled one to move from literacy to literary. McHenry argues that bibliographies are a conceptual tool for understanding African American literary history. The argument grapples with the idea of the "site of learning" (37), which entails not only the details of the text and author but also the location of the text and author. Some examples include Daniel Murray's project, which draws on information from various sources outside America...

“Persons with whom I am acquainted”: Frederick Douglass’s Encounters with Americans in Europe in 1887, and Maybe Jack the Ripper

“Persons with whom I am acquainted”: Frederick Douglass’s Encounters with Americans in Europe in 1887, and Maybe Jack the Ripper

Non-aligned ethnographies

This article proposes a non-exhaustive panorama of the experiences of observation made by Africans or ethnologists, Asian or Latin Americans in Europe, by trying to draw some lines of reflection on their conditions of emergence as on the fundamental asymmetry which characterizes them when put in comparison with the experiences of European anthropologists in the formerly colonized societies or in margin of Europe.

Technology and Truth. Reflections on Russia, America, and Live Not By Lies

The main thesis of the author of the essay is that in contemporary Western society the objective and subjective truth is created by the people. This is the key to what the author calls technological and technocratic society for which truth and reason are no longer the goals that the man should be striving for in his thoughts and behavior. In a technocratic society the reality itself is created and thus accordingly the term “lie” loses its meaning. Anything can potentially be viewed as a useful step in the process of creating something new and “efficient” for those who above all value the strengthening of their own control (over people, nature, etc). Subjects acting in the framework of technological society deny any identifications and technologically determine themselves what man, nature and society is, – right down to the basics of our biological existence. This approach overturns such notion as absolute truth, establishing relevant truth. In contemporary Western society subjective and objective truth is created. The author examines in detail how this approach is used by the United States in their international policy to achieve dominance. He also considers Russia to be the only great power that is prepared to choose a different line of development due to its historical development. The possibility of such choice is capable to prevent final Americanization of Europe, which, should it happen, would lead to the “mankind as a whole losing its past”, as Simone Weil predicted.

The End of Americanization? or Reinventing a Research Field for Historians of Europe

The Americanization of Europe has been an elusive and controversial topic for historians because it poses questions of definition, causation, development, and significance. This essay addresses these issues, reviews the historiographical record, reassesses the current paradigm, and presents an agenda for future research. A revitalized paradigm theorizes Americanization as a disruptive force on European society and culture rather than a process of benign appropriation or trivial imitation. It incorporates American corporate and political power limiting local agency, treats transatlantic exchange at multiple levels while retaining the filter of the national, and maintains that the process, rather than coming to an end, has become the new norm. I also argue that Americanization functioned as a stimulus and foil for self-assessment that illuminates basic concerns of Europeans. Most important, the phenomenon of Americanization represents the American phase of European globalization, identifying America’s contribution to the interconnection and homogenization of the transatlantic community but also exposing resistance to transnationalism. Anti-Americanism, the twentieth-century opposition to Americanization, anticipated current challenges to globalization. My aim is to rescue this topic from critics who have disparaged it and to (re)establish it as a viable field of historical research. For Europeans, the twentieth century was the American century.

Transnationalising American progressivism and emancipation: Frances B. Johnston and progressive education at the 1900 Paris universal exposition

ABSTRACTAt the 1900 Paris World’s Fair, Frances Benjamin Johnston, one of America’s first women photographers, played a key role in publicising in Europe American progressivism and emancipation in education. Through displaying photographs taken in the Washington DC public schools, she revealed to the international audience how American progressive reformers were aiming at providing a freer, more child-centred and democratic education to children in the public schools. Such pioneering effort to disclose these accomplishments was met with considerable interest and laudatory comments from French officials and school professionals. Being a prominent character in American photography, Johnston’s life and work have long aroused the interest of historians of art and women. However, her role in publicising progressive education’s ideals and emancipatory dimensions remain an understudied and yet important topic in order to analyse the transnationalising of American progressivism in education. Using archival and primary sources from the French and US governments, this article analyses the reception of the American educational exhibit displayed at the 1900 universal exposition in France. It thus aims at highlighting the ways in which photography was used as a powerful medium to document, spread and propagandise American reform effort in education across the Atlantic.

On the Use of Force

In the mid-1960s, the United States witnessed increasing social unrest: students led protests against the Vietnam war, and many black Americans expressed disillusionment over piecemeal gains of the civil rights movement. Whereas history remembers the antiwar rallies mostly as protests, official records often code black demonstrations in Boston, Cleveland, Buffalo, and the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles as riots. In response to two so-called riots in Newark, New Jersey, in July 1967, Chester Himes wrote “On the Use of Force” for the 24 July 1967 issue of the weekly Gaullist magazine Le nouveau Candide, where it was published in French translation (French version). The essay, never before published in English, offers timely thoughts concerning police brutality and is sure to be valuable for Himes scholarship, the story of black Americans in Europe, and the history of race and violence.

Little Magazine, World Form by Eric Bulson

Reviewed by: Little Magazine, World Form by Eric Bulson Mark Gaipa Little Magazine, World Form. Eric Bulson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv + 338. $60.00 (cloth). How do you write about a topic that lies beyond any one person's reach? That's the challenge Eric Bulson takes up in his ambitious new book, Little Magazine, World Form, in which he attempts to move modernist studies in the direction of world literature through the medium of the little magazine. Starting with the notion that modernism and the avant-garde grew out of little magazines, Bulson argues that our current understanding of this print medium is so narrowly focused by language and national culture that we have overlooked little cultural magazines that circulated just across our borders, including the wide array of such magazines that were published around the globe between the 1910s and 1960s. One of his aims for this book, then, is to supplement our understanding of this medium by "enlarging the geography and expanding the timeline" of the little magazine (3). But by aspiring to a global perspective on the medium, Bulson also believes we can bring into view a worldwide network of little magazines, which in turn might defamiliarize and revitalize how we understand both magazines and modernism. Bulson has few illusions about the difficulties ahead of him: there are too many magazines, written in too many (untranslated) languages, sutured to too many cultural histories for any one scholar to master them all; and that's not even factoring in the way the magazines themselves, if substantial runs have survived, still remain largely inaccessible, scattered across the globe, despite recent efforts to digitize and bring some of them online. Who has the time or expertise or financial wherewithal to do it all? Which is why this book, in launching this project, is really a call to arms: an appeal to scholars to join Bulson in cultivating this new field, with the author laying the groundwork and pointing the way forward. In his introduction and first chapter, Bulson lays out his methodology and theoretical framework for investigating a worldwide network of little magazines, which he begins to flesh out in successive chapters, by studying British and American little magazines on either side of the Atlantic before and after World War I; Italian little magazines (riviste) published in Milan between the wars; exiled magazines from the same period published by Americans in Europe and European surrealists in America; postcolonial magazines from the West Indies and Africa in the 1950s and 60s; and, back in Italy, a multitude of futurist riviste that, inspired by technology like the wireless telegraph, were used to broadcast the futurist movement across the country. (There's also a short afterword about current technology and the digital remediation of modernist little magazines today.) By the end of the book, Bulson has proven himself to be a first-rate globetrotting scholar and expert travel guide, having led us through substantial discussions of over forty little magazines from five continents. But given the breadth of the field, the book is best regarded as still a series of case studies, more sampler than survey. Rather than map a new field of study, then, Bulson has modeled a strategy for exploring it, test-driving his methodology in the differing terrains of his six chapters. That methodology is best described as a materialist comparative approach, by which he anchors each magazine in its specific material context while using the common medium of the little magazine to relate different titles from across time, regions, languages, and cultures. I'll talk more about this relational network below, but first let's consider the materialist perspective that lies quietly behind the word "form" in the book's title. By this term, Bulson points us toward the magazine's materiality, "both the internal structure … and its external shape, design, and construction" (22). Drawing from Fredric Jameson's notion of the "form symptom," Bulson also sees the form of the little magazine as concealing "social relationships and political conflict within the concreteness of its structure" (22–23). If we are to articulate the complex relationships among the world's little magazines, we first...

American Writers in Europe: 1850 to the Present

American Writers in Europe: 1850 to the Present

'Celebrities of the Future': Fame and Notability in Henry James's Roderick Hudson and The American

Focusing on two of Henry James’s earliest novels, Roderick Hudson (1875) and The American (1877), this essay explores the ways in which James’s initial formulation of his signature ‘international theme’ intersects with nineteenth-century discourses on fame. Roderick Hudson positions the eponymous American sculptor as a lion and notable in Europe, and then shows his fatal attempts to transcend the objectification and commodification that accompany fame. In The American the protagonist, Christopher Newman, is briefly lionized by French aristocrats, the Bellegardes; to make him socially acceptable to them, he is displayed as a notable within their exclusive, privileged circle, but is afterwards publicly spurned. Both novels provocatively contrast the fate of these American men with the successful use of the mechanisms of fame by two women. In Roderick Hudson, the Europeanized American Christina Light successfully brands and markets her beauty, and becomes, through marriage, a figure of aristocratic renown, the Princess Casamassima. In The American, the French copyist Noemie Nioche effectively negotiates her rise in the world through self-display and self-promotion and finally passes as a noblewoman. Drawing on imagery of statuary, performance, and display, these novels foreground links and conflicts between newer forms of recognition associated with notability and celebrity and older ideas of aristocratic renown. Moreover, using the figure of the American in Europe, James draws attention to the complex ways nationality and gender interconnect in constructions of public recognition.

War and Union in Little America: The Space of Hawthorne's Rome

[I brave] the imputation of making a mere Rome of words, talking of a Rome of my own which was no Rome of reality. That comes up as exactly the point-that no Rome of reality was concerned in our experience, that the whole thing was a rare state of the imagination [....] Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends I Home to one of the United States' earliest expatriate communities and an important overseas center for artistic creation, nineteenth-century Rome was simultaneously a physical locus for the production of American arts and letters, an iconic symbol of America's Republican heritage, and a setting onto which Americans projected their hopes and fears for the contemporary United States. Rome was, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "the capital of the ancient & of the modern world" (372), and for Nathaniel Hawthorne, no less than for sculptors like Thomas Crawford and William Story, it was a space in which to fashion American symbols. The Marble Faun (1860) offered descriptions of exotic foreign landscapes to an American readership eager for firsthand views of both contemporary and historic Europe, and for cues as to their own developing national identity. This article suggests how Hawthorne's descriptions of (or as James might have said, imaginations of) Rome tell a story of national identity and national schisms during a period of civil turmoil, unification and territorial expansion on both sides of the Atlantic. As Emerson noted, "Every traveler must describe not what is, but what he sees," for "the best things we learn" from travel in Italy are "confirmation in unexpected quarters of our simplest sentiments at home." "[N]ames and places" being "of small importance," he supposed, a "well regulated mind will attain to the same thoughts and feelings in Sicily, in Rome, in New England" (Lectures 90). Much as Michel de Certeau imagined that "we travel abroad to discover in distant lands something whose presence at home has become unrecognizable" (50), Henry James wrote in 1867 that Americans in Europe were able to "pick and choose and assimilate and in short (aesthetically &c) claim our property wherever we find it" (A Life in Letters 17). This "aesthetic claiming" of cultural markers in a landscape already rich with its own systems of meaning is an act de Certeau dubbed a tactic, a technique many critics have noted in American writings of the period set in Rome. Paola Gemme, for example, has outlined Risorgimento-era comparisons of Italians with American slaves, and of Austrian rulers with American slaveholders, a paradigm used to support arguments both for and against U.S. slavery. Dennis Berthold, meanwhile, has suggested that connections between foreign politics and American domestic issues influenced the writings of Herman Melville, whose fictional characters may have been inspired by contemporary Risorgimento leaders (122) and who drew parallels between Italy's unification and the North's struggle to end slavery while maintaining the union. Such transatlantic transferences may also map geographic metaphors found in Italy back onto the United States. Annamaria Formichella Elsden notes how critics have identified passages from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Agnes of Sorrento (1861), contrasting "southern" Italy with "northern" Europe, "as evidence of a neat north/south parallelism that can be imported back to U.S. soil" (67). Elsden cites Nathalia Wright's reference to "an echo of the nineteenth-century American sectional conflict over slavery in the contrast established between the voluptuous south of Italy and the north, with its reforming impulse" (Wright 93), and Jenny Franchot's suggestion that Agnes of Sorrento "offers an expatriate justification for American northern assertions of superiority over the American South ... and its enslaved population of African Americans" (Franchot 247). This geographic binarism of South and North in the antebellum United States was also being "exported" in the other direction and projected onto Rome by American writers. …

Max Weber’s Recognition of America: Europeanization of America or Americanization of Europe

Max Weber’s Recognition of America: Europeanization of America or Americanization of Europe

A Study on the International Theme, as a Prominent Subject in the Works of Henry James

Among the subjects and themes which are found in the works of 19th American great novelist Henry James, the international theme of America versus Europe is the most recurrent one. Actually Henry James is well-known based on his international novels through which he uses his own experiences as an American in Europe and wrote about the adventures of Americans abroad, mostly in Europe. Actually through his international theme he deals with America and Europe, he practiced this matter so well in his works that he is in some degree known as the master of international novel. James through his international novels or better to say through his international theme of America versus Europe wanted to show the contrasts between America and Europe and between their societies, cultures, ideals, conventions and characters. Indeed Henry James is the most merited novelist to write about these contrasts and conflicts because he had the experience of living both in America and in Europe for a long time, so he was completely familiar with the societies, cultures, conventions, ideals, and the characters of both America and Europe. This research is going to first discuss international theme in its general meaning and then the international theme of Henry James and the reasons which caused James to practice the international theme through his works.

Being American in Europe: 1750-1860 by Daniel Kilbride (review)

Reviewed by: Being American in Europe: 1750-1860 by Daniel Kilbride Andrew P. White Daniel Kilbride. Being American in Europe: 1750-1860. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2013. 230p. Historians have documented the unparalleled growth of America in the nineteenth century, but the focus has been primarily westward in orientation. The United States was intensely self-absorbed in nation-building through territorial expansion and conquest, and exploration and settlement of those new lands. In addition, there was the intractable problem of slavery. The focus of antebellum America was decidedly inward, though policies such as the Monroe Doctrine delineated a broader, hemispheric foreign policy. Daniel Kilbride, in his insightful and thought-provoking study, Being American in Europe: 1750-1860, provides another perspective on this critical period in American history. Instead of looking to the West, he follows the journeys of Americans to the East, to Europe, examining how the “Old World” forced Americans to confront questions about their own identity. It was one thing to declare political independence from Europe’s greatest colonial power, but quite another altogether to declare cultural independence from Western Europe, and most traveling Americans were reluctant to do so despite waves of Anglophobia and Europhobia at home. With its alluring beauty and fascinating depth, Europe made America seem shallow in comparison. This was problematic for American patriotism and nation-building, and Kilbride’s stated purpose is to address “how Americans defined themselves within and against [End Page 94] Europe in the formative period of national identity”(7). In the postrevolutionary era especially, there was great anxiety over America’s relationship to the world’s most powerful continent. American tourists were remarkably sensitive about how they were viewed in Europe, and resented being perceived as provincials, rustics, or parvenus. They also felt affronted by apparent English and European indifference towards American affairs. From the evidence Kilbride presents, it is clear that most traveling Americans were proud of their new republic and had a strong moral obligation to take the light of democracy back to Europe, seeking out signs of egalitarian progress in England and, especially, on the Continent. Kilbride begins the book with the period around 1750 when the American colonies were joining forces to counter the French and their Indian allies, and concludes his study with the time just before the Civil War. In his reconstruction of Americans’ struggle with Americanness, however, Kilbride does not turn to the usual suspects. He deliberately sets aside the views of well-known travel writers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and instead “examines the views of the obscure, and largely forgotten, women and men who visited Europe between 1750 and 1860” (7). These views are derived from unpublished life-writings (manuscripts), especially diaries, journals, and letters, along with lesser-known print sources. Kilbride’s foregrounding of primary source materials is one of the book’s greatest strengths. With this wealth of texts (and there is a useful summary of these sources at the end of the book), Kilbride presents a complicated picture of Americanness that is deeply ambivalent, even paradoxical, at times. There are ample, yet aptly, quoted passages from these texts, many of them providing a rich flavor of the personality and language of the individual writers. One striking section, for instance, is on postrevolutionary Americans’ preference for Scotland, particularly American admiration of the modernity of Edinburgh’s New Town and American appreciation of Scottish hospitality (51-53). The main points of the study emerge inductively, yet clearly, despite some repetition. Kilbride draws attention to key issues that Americans faced as they encountered Europe. These include: (1) morality (the fear that European society, especially the upper-classes, could corrupt naive Americans); (2) the tension between Anglophilia and Anglophobia (especially after the Revolutionary War, which softened, according to Kilbride, after 1820); (3) the difference between views of the British Isles (more favorable) and the Continent (less favorable); (4) Protestantism vs. Catholicism (with a running strain of anti-Catholicism, accentuated by anxiety over the influx of Irish immigrants); (5) “Catholic envy” (regarding the cultural wealth of the Roman church, with its art and spectacular cathedrals and churches); (6) the inconsistency between extreme wealth (the [End Page 95] aristocracy...

Introduction: Native Americans in Europe in the Twentieth Century

Roy Harvey Pearce’s classic 1965 study of the ‘savage’ in American culture traces savagist origins to a European philosophical tradition in which the social theorist attempts to imagine society in its earliest formations, comparing the imagined forebear with contemporary reality. The collision between this Rousseauian abstraction and frontier reality, argues Pearce, where ‘a primitivistic mode of social criticism came to America fully developed and virtually innocent of actual study of actual primitives’ (1965: 136), birthed a remarkably stable set of signifiers of savagism as the polar opposite of civilization. Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr, in The White Man’s Indian (1979) extends both our understanding of the bon sauvage tradition and its revaluation under Romanticism in the early Republic to explain how even as tribes were being herded from their lands under armed guard, New York and Washington audiences came to weep for the plight of King Philip in Metamora, Or the Last of the Wampanoags (1829). The do med Indian, noble or ignoble, came to symbolize the inevitability of American progress.

ANTI-AMERICANISM IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY EUROPE

ABSTRACTSince the beginning of the twentieth century, European observers and commentators have frequently employed the term ‘Americanization’ to make sense of the astonishing rise of the USA to the status of a world power. More specifically, they used this term to describe the social changes brought about by industrialization and urbanization. In this context, European intellectuals have often used ‘America’ as shorthand for ‘modernity’; across the Atlantic, they believed, it was possible to learn and see the future of their own societies. Criticism of ‘the Americanization of Europe’ – or the world – easily led to outright anti-Americanism, i.e. a radical and reductionist ideology which held the USA responsible for the economic, political, or cultural ills of modern societies. The war in Iraq in 2003 and the alienation between the USA and France and Germany that followed provided a new impetus for studying the history of European perceptions of America. A large number of studies have since been published that deal with the history of the ‘Americanization of Europe’ and anti-Americanism, and several monographs, which are based on original research and promise new insights, will be the focus of this historiographical review.

The Lesson of Gayatri Spivak

One repays a teacher badly if one remains nothing but a pupil. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 1 ‘Ah, what am I?’ sighed the master, shaking his head. Henry James, ‘The L...

Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism (review)

Reviewed by: Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism David Prior (bio) Keywords 1848 revolutions, Europe, international relations Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism. By Timothy Mason Roberts. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009. Pp. 256. Cloth, $40.00.) Timothy Mason Roberts has written a thoughtful and well-researched analysis of American reactions to the European revolutions of 1848. While this topic has long garnered attention from American historians, it is only with Roberts's Distant Revolutions that we have such a comprehensive [End Page 347] yet concise interpretation of it. In particular, Roberts's work distinguishes itself within an already impressive literature by spanning the range of European revolutionary activity and, even more so, the variety of American perspectives. In so doing, his work serves as an excellent introduction to this subject and advances the drive to place U.S. history in global context. Instructors would do well to consider Distant Revolutions for graduate or advanced undergraduate courses on the Atlantic world, the nineteenth-century United States, and the international dimensions of U.S. history. Roberts's overarching argument is that the revolutionary developments of 1848, and the wave of repression that followed, were distant from Americans in two key ways. First, most Americans understood Europe to be not only geographically separate but also distinctive from the United States. In terms of society, cultures, and politics, Americans were aware of, and often fixated on, European differences. Second, Roberts demonstrates that because Americans were chronologically distant from their own revolutionary past, they could falsely believe their country had achieved independence through a rational, orderly process conducive to peace and prosperity. This mythic history proved integral to American judgments of Europeans, especially as reports and rumors of violence and chaos in the revolutions of 1848 became widespread. As Roberts shows, the reactions of different groups of Americans largely revolved around these basic presumptions. Roberts begins by looking at Americans in Europe in 1848, noting that most were initially optimistic, even exuberant, about the movements, but that many soon soured at the specter of revolutionary violence and radicalism. The bulk of the book then focuses on the responses of Americans in the United States, including northern and southern whites, political partisans, northern reformers, and several religious denominations. Roberts's second chapter, which explores popular culture, is particularly noteworthy for its fascinating and novel evidence, although all of his chapters are trenchant and rich with sources. Throughout, one gets a detailed understanding of the giddiness of many American onlookers, especially Democrats and reformers, as well as the greater anxiety and suspicion of more conservative Americans, including Whigs, southern slaveholders, orthodox Calvinists, and Catholics. Roberts also traces change over time, illuminating how many Americans quickly began to express doubts about the prospects for republican government in Europe. As they did so, these Americans began to speak less of the role of [End Page 348] the United States as an example for aspiring republicans and more of its alleged exceptionalism. Finally, Roberts also attends to the diversity of American opinions concerning the various European movements that together made 1848 and the following years such a dramatic period. Americans were often, for example, worried about French radicalism and disdainful of Italy's Catholics. Insightfully, Roberts points out that Americans seemed to invest their greatest hopes in precisely those European rebels, the Hungarians, about whom they knew the least. His eighth chapter then turns to the legacy of 1848, arguing that "Bleeding Kansas" convinced many antislavery Americans that their country was succumbing to European-style despotism. Such fears, he avers, prompted some northerners to reconsider whether their country remained exceptional. His brief epilogue carries his analysis into the Civil War years by looking at the influence of European revolutions and revolutionaries on John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. None of this, of course, is meant to imply that Distant Revolutions is, or claims to be, the final word on the connections between Europe and the United States in the period surrounding 1848. In fact, despite Roberts's impressive historiographical legwork, he misses the opportunity to more clearly situate his study within the literature. Specifically, while Roberts is correct to suggest that earlier publications...

Passing Strange and post-civil rights blackness

The American in Europe is everywhere confronted with the question of his identity.2 In her groundbreaking 2000 article 'Black like this: race, generation, and rock in the post-civil rights era', anthropologist Maureen Mahon describes the 'contemporary condition of double-consciousness' that shapes the experiences of African-Americans growing up in the decades after the black freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. 3 Focusing on members of the Black Rock Coalition (BRC), a group of musician-activists working to reclaim the blackness of rock-and-roll, Mahon finds that these predominantly middle-class young African-Americans - most born after 1960 - inherit a historically specific set of challenges regarding race and racial self-definition. Whereas earlier generations struggled against de jure segregation and second-class citizenship, this 'post-civil rights' generation, as Mahon and others dub it, inherits a world in which important legislative and juridical victories have already been achieved. As middle-class Americans, they have been the beneficiaries of civil rights victories in school desegregation, affirmative action and equal employment. On the other hand, this generation must negotiate new challenges that emerge from new expressions of racism and changes in racial discourse. As Mahon discovers through detailed interviews with BRC members, even economic privilege does not mitigate this younger generation's struggles against exclusion, discrimination and racial definition. It is simply that these struggles take place amid a new set of social and political challenges. Post-civil rights double-consciousness is the thematic, aesthetic and political terrain of the critically acclaimed musical Passing Strange, which had its most visible run at the Belasco Theatre on Broadway in 2008, and appeared in 2009 as a film by the director Spike Lee.4 In Passing Strange - the title is simultaneously a riff on Othello, a meditation on the 'strangeness' of identity, a commentary on expatriate/eira/Tger experience and a reference to racial passing - we find a lively and robust engagement with the contradictions of post-civil rights racial discourse, in which blackness is represented as multiple and shifting and in which identity is assumed to be performative rather than natural. Indeed, in taking blackness for granted as a complex and dynamic experience rather than a determinate state of belonging or being, Passing Strange is a passing narrative for the post-passing era: hip to anti-essentialist critiques of race as a social construct, tuned in to the ways that blackness is lived through class, gender, embodiment, sexuality and geography, and self-conscious about the histories of black American cosmopolitanism and the contemporary social and political minefields delineated in phrases such as 'acting black' or 'acting white'.5 Like other passing narratives in the twentieth-century American canon -including James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun and Nella Larsen's Quicksand - Passing Strange sends its protagonist across national borders, to Northern Europe, where he experiences a welcome reprieve from US racial definition.6 As a post-civil rights passing narrative, however, Passing Strange is also acutely aware of the mutableness of black experience in the diaspora and of the ways that black Americanness, in particular, circulates as a fetishised and desired cultural commodity for white Europeans. This is, in other words, a tale of black bohemian cosmopolitanism in which the middle-class black protagonist is already schooled in the twentiethcentury history of black bohemian cosmopolitanism. And while the ending of Passing Strange returns the protagonist home - to mother love and to 'mother' country - the musical is reluctant to find resolution in the protagonist's embrace of what Michelle Stephens, in her article 'What is this black in black diaspora?', calls 'color' or 'race' consciousness. …

The Cambridge companion to American travel writing

Chronology Introduction: new worlds and old lands: the travel book and the construction of American identity Judith Hamera and Alfred Bendixen Part I. Confronting the American Landscape: 1. Beginnings: the origins of American travel writing in the Pre-Revolutionary period Philip Gould 2. Landscape and American travel writing William W. Stowe 3. New York to Niagara by way of the Hudson and the Erie Christopher Mulvey 4. The Mississippi river as site and symbol Thomas Ruys Smith 5. The Southwest and travel writing Martin Padget Part II. Americans Abroad: 6. American travel books about Europe before the Civil War Alfred Bendixen 7. Americans in Europe: Henry James to the present William Merrill Decker 8. Americans in the Holy Land, Israel and Palestine Hilton Obenzinger 9. Americans in the larger world: beyond the Pacific coast Christopher McBride 10. South of the border: American travel writing in Latin America Terry Caesar Part III. Social Scenes and American Sites: 11. African American travel literature Virginia Whatley Smith 12. American women and travel writing Susan L. Roberson 13. Driving that highway to consciousness: late twentieth-century American travel literature Deborah Paes de Barros Guide to further reading Index.