Contemporary America Research Articles

Occupational Dissimilarity between the American Indian/Alaska Native Workforce and White Workforce in the Contemporary United States.

Who has which job? When this answer differs by race group or sex, inefficiencies such as labor market discrimination or suboptimal investment in education may be impeding productivity and sustaining inequities. We use US census data to analyze the occupational structure of American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) workers, relative to non-Hispanic White workers. AIAN workers (especially men and single-race AIAN workers) are generally overrepresented in low-skilled occupations and underrepresented in high-skilled occupations, relative to White workers. AIAN occupational dissimilarity does not appear to have declined substantially since 1980. Sex-specific multivariate analyses do not remove the significant inequalities in observed occupational outcomes.

Reflections on Class: Intersectional, Anticapitalist Pedagogies for Our Times

The contemporary United States is defined by extreme economic inequality. However, the public discourse on class has been strikingly anemic. Whereas the white working class is portrayed as victims of globalization who are denied economic opportunities they deserve, impoverished communities of color are represented as an undeserving, criminal class who would rather live off taxpayers than work and fulfill their social responsibilities. Recognizing that women, queer and transgender people, immigrants, people of color, indigenous people, people with disabilities, and those who live at the intersections of these categories disproportionately bear the costs neoliberalism and have historically led the way in organizing resistance to capitalist exploitation, this essay reflects on strategies for developing an intersectional, anticapitalist pedagogy. Drawing on my experience teaching a course about social movements organized around care work, I highlight the ways that centering waged and unwaged reproductive labor potentially disrupts dominant narratives of class and offers students valuable skills for both understanding and resisting racialized and gendered capitalism in the current moment.

“What Matters Now”: Reading Fanon’s Call for Decolonization and Humanization in the Contemporary United States

“What Matters Now”: Reading Fanon’s Call for Decolonization and Humanization in the Contemporary United States Courtney L. Gildersleeve (bio) In a passage from the “Conclusion” of The Wretched of the Earth,1 some of Frantz Fanon’s last printed words before his death in 1961, he cautions his comrades throughout the decolonizing world against adopting any aspects of the model through which “a particular Europe” had long brutalized humanity.2 Fanon identifies colonialism and capitalism, and the racism and racialized violence on which they are predicated, as systems that must be thoroughly overcome for human life to persist, making clear that the work of decolonization is not complete after formal independence. With a palpable sense of urgency, he writes: What matters now is not a question of profitability, not a question of increased productivity, not a question of production rates. . . . It is the very basic question of not dragging man in directions which mutilate him, of not imposing on his brain tempos that rapidly obliterate and unhinge it. The notion of catching up must not be used as a pretext to brutalize man, to tear him from himself and his inner consciousness, to break him, to kill him. (Fanon 2004, 238) [End Page 24] Speaking from his lived knowledge of the colonial order in Martinique, Algeria, and France, Fanon advocates a categorical rejection of colonialism at all levels of society, and within the body and mind of the human being. As we see in the passage, this task crucially involves renouncing a capitalist notion of progress. Such efforts would inaugurate a radical transformation, ultimately effecting, in Fanon’s words, the creation of a “new man.” Fanon’s work resonates strongly today because “not dragging man in directions which mutilate him” arguably remains a “very basic question.” From ongoing drone strikes, to mass deportations, to military occupation, to assaults on basic social services, to various forms of terrorism, not only can one name countless instances of the breaking of human bodies and minds, and the destruction of lives, but the “mutilation of the human” seems to stand as a dominant feature of this age.3 It is not enough, however, simply to lament the current state of the world, in which the dehumanizing conditions that Fanon so fiercely contested in his work and his life persist. We know that his methodology, grounded in psychiatric practice, involves a precise naming of the ills of a society and an attempt to diagnose their origin, and, as a revolutionary, taking actions to fundamentally transform what causes harm. With regard to the still-existing colonial rule in his time, Fanon theorized what one might call the corrective role of violence in destroying colonialism. Rather than assert an absolute position toward Fanon’s analysis of violence, much less speak of violence in abstract terms, I want to locate this matter within another core preoccupation of his work. Coming to Fanon with a concern for the current proliferation of extreme brutality, but wary of merely moralistic appeals to nonviolence, what I am most interested in highlighting is the capacious notion of human agency that his work develops, and of which violence is but one part. When he states that “the dreams of the colonial subject are dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality,” Fanon identifies that fundamental to colonialism’s pathology is a reliance on inhibiting, even destroying, the mobility and agential capacity of a whole group or groups of people (2004, 15). It is such petrification—and the means of reproducing it—that must be challenged. One of the most generative aspects of Fanon’s work is his advocacy of human agency—his foregrounding of the human as a being who can act in and upon the world, and in history. For one thing, this way of thinking presents an antidote against the threat of powerlessness that one might experience before the problems of our time, and arguably [End Page 25] against systems of oppression at large. In this spirit, and in order to move beyond a general commentary on the unjust global order, another moment in the “Conclusion” begs our attention. In urging his comrades in the anti-colonial struggle to choose a path...

Studying Catholic Parishes: Moving beyond the Parochial

Studying Catholic Parishes: Moving beyond the Parochial Mary Ellen Konieczny33 My interest in the sociological study of Catholic parishes is both scholarly and practical, based in two very different professional experiences that together make me something of an “inside-outsider” to this world. I introduce my comments on the value of studying parishes by discussing these two experiences, since each orients me differently vis-a-vis American Catholicism and its parishes, and they inform each other. The first lens is institutional, and reflects an “insider” role in the Catholic Church. Before my graduate studies in sociology, I pursued and received a Master of Divinity degree and worked in the Archdiocese of Chicago for nine years. Seven of these years were spent working in Cardinal Joseph Bernardin’s administration, where I had the opportunity to visit and/or work closely with between one-third and one-half of the archdiocese’s parishes (which then numbered over 350). During these years I got to know Chicago’s parishes well. But more than this, immersed in the world of archdiocesan administration, I was exposed to the structure, networks, and politics of a large and complex bureaucracy that was often tightly coupled with its parishes. The second lens is rooted in my graduate training in sociology at the University of Chicago. When I entered graduate school, my mentors encouraged me to study Catholicism. Consciously choosing an “outsider” status that I didn’t have previously, I saw the parish ethnographies I conducted for my dissertation research as not only a way to contribute to sociology, but also as useful to American Catholics. The result was my first book, The Spirit’s Tether: Family, Work, and Religion among American Catholics.34 In that book, I sought to understand why cultural conflicts surrounding the family (such as those over abortion, homosexuality, and women’s roles in church and society) are so resonant among contemporary Catholics, and how parishes may contribute to moral polarization in larger civic and ecclesial arenas. I still see this as a crucial challenge for U.S. Catholics [End Page 13] as well as for American society writ large. But just as important, Chicago’s internationally-oriented environment trained my scholarly gaze in a way that is surprisingly compatible with Catholic thought: it directed me toward the variability and interconnectedness of the larger human community, seen through local manifestations of the Catholic Church. These twin perspectives—as both insider and outsider—shape the way I think about Catholic parishes and inform the comments that follow. Studying Catholic Parishes—Beyond the Parochial? “Why should sociologists, and other scholars, pay attention to Catholic parishes today?” is an important question for those of us who study Catholicism. I think it is particularly important because—like any empirical topic we are invested in—we may find ourselves inadvertently forgetting that, because many of our colleagues may not be as captivated by the subject matter as we are, we may actually need to work to convince them of the significance of what can be learned by engaging parish studies. In fact, the “why” of studying parishes is perhaps especially pertinent today in the contemporary United States, where the decline in religious affiliation, including among Catholics, along with the recent accelerated rise in the percentage of religious “nones,”35 has been interpreted by some as rendering religion generally, and Catholicism in particular, as lacking relevance in contemporary Western societies. Thus, the “why” question ultimately does scholars of American Catholicism a service, because it has the potential—perhaps ironically, given that we are talking about parishes—to move us beyond the parochial. What do I mean by parochialism here? Poulson and Campbell, in assessing parochialism in the sociology of religion, define it as “a tendency for sociologists to focus on issues being debated in their own society.”36 And in fact, there is an older criticism that sociological research on religion, especially institutionally-oriented research, tends toward parochialism. In particular, some strains of denominationally-oriented [End Page 14] research on religion have neglected to consider the larger theoretical significance of its empirical findings.37 Of course, there is a tension here for scholars who care about making a public or...

The Evolution of American Airport Chapels: Local Negotiations in Religiously Pluralistic Contexts

AbstractReligion and spirituality are present in many organizations in the contemporary United States. While religious studies scholars have traditionally focused on local congregations, some are branching out to explore religion in a broader range of public institutions. Between 1950, when many scholars conceptualized American religion in terms of Will Herberg's classic Protestant-Catholic-Jew and the present, chapels in public institutions including the military, healthcare centers, universities, prisons and airports have expanded and diversified. I focus on airports tracing the evolution of airport chapels from Catholic centered to more multi-faith to more religiously inclusive as unlikely, or perhaps just hidden, analytic mirrors for demographic and cultural changes in American religion. Theoretically, these chapels are case studies that show how the function and appropriate place for religion in public institutions has been improvised and negotiated locally. The clergy, airport personnel and airport chaplains who make decisions about these spaces lack consistent education about the topic and receive inconsistent guidance from laws and policies across city, state, and federal contexts. The chapel spaces that result are, therefore, much more varied than one might expect and shaped as much by fears about what could cause conflict as by responses to actual conflicts.

Shelby, Tommie. Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016. Pp. 352. $29.95 (cloth).

Tommie Shelby’s Dark Ghettos: Injustice Dissent and Reform is an unusual and highly original endeavor for analytical political philosophy. It is an examination of a central aspect of racial injustice in the contemporary United States. Shelby writes from the standpoint of non-ideal justice, but within a distinctly Rawlsian flavor and conceptual repertoire. Rawls has been criticized for his lack of attention to the topic of race, and for his concentration on ideal theory, but this work shows that Rawls’s contribution to the theory of justice can yield dividends well outside its initial range of application. The publication of this book is a significant event in contemporary political philosophy. In addition to its exceptional merit in itself, it can be seen as part of an increasing, and very welcome, movement to broaden the range of topics and concerns that can legitimately be regarded as within the scope of the discipline.

SHIFTING POWER

AbstractWhile prisoners cannot vote, they are counted as residents of the often rural legislative districts where they are incarcerated rather than their home districts. We examine the extent to which incarceration shifts the balance of a representative democracy by considering its impact on legislative apportionment. Drawing on data from the Census, Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, and Pennsylvania Redistricting Commission, we develop a counterfactual framework to examine whether removing and returning prisoners to their home districts affects equal representation. Because prisoners are disproportionately African American, we also employ this counterfactual to assess racial differences in the impact of prison gerrymandering. Findings indicate that incarceration shifts political power from urban districts to suburban and rural districts through legislative apportionment. Moreover, non-White communities suffer the most. We conclude by considering how our findings fit a growing literature on the role of mass incarceration in [re]producing racial inequalities in the contemporary United States.

Socialism and the Liberal Imagination

What is "democratic socialism" in contemporary America? Sanders argued in 2015 it's what Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal did. Now, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has vaulted onto the national political scene on a platform that sounds unmistakably familiar to students of American liberalism. This appropriation of liberal reform under the banner of socialism has inspired a number of writers to accuse Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and their aspiring democratic-socialist counterparts of muddying the waters by conflating theoretically distinct concepts. These critiques rest on a set of uncontestable historical facts. But look from another angle, and the picture appears different—and perhaps more useful in thinking through our own political moment. The New Deal was not "socialist." But to end the story there is to miss the role of socialists in crafting the intellectual world within which the New Deal unfolded. Look not at what socialism was, but at what socialists did, and one sees that the New Deal's progressive achievements do bear a significant historical relationship to reform socialism.

The Contemporary United States Workplace: An Analysis of Racial Segregation Perceptions

This study examines the perceptions of those employed regarding racial segre-gation in the contemporary American workplace. General Social Survey (GSS) information collected in 2016 was used to focus on perceptions of individuals who are currently workin...

Dark Knowledge in The Handmaid's Tale Vol. 53, No. 3 Spring/Summer 1991)

Dark Knowledge in The Handmaid's Tale Vol. 53, No. 3 Spring/Summer 1991) Jeanne Campbell Reesman Among critics of Margaret Atwood, an important question about her work—whether or not she is a feminist—has given rise to considerable confusion. If she is chary of being categorized with contemporary United States writers and their traditions, a practice that sometimes threatens to obscure her Canadian identity, she is even more prickly when questioned about her identity as a feminist. Both of these concerns—her relationship to other writers and her feminism—may be addressed by analyzing an important metaphoric pattern in Atwood's most successful novel, The Handmaid's Tale: the replacement of ocular images for knowing with conversational ones. What is revealed is a profound feminist commitment through language. We need a greater sense of Atwood's work within both the cultural and feminist contexts, for her feminist readers often miss both her feminism and her position among North American writers, while other readers need to address more carefully how her feminism permeates every aspect of her works' structure, characterization, and imagery. The Handmaid's Tale replaces the certainty of rigid categories of any kind with the fluidity of an extraordinary heroine's voice. Delicately but unerringly addressing many of our most urgent cultural preoccupations, The Handmaid's Tale (1985) quickly became a bestseller. Ostensibly fantastic in its mode, it engages religious fundamentalism, sexism, racism, pollution, nuclear war, and political chaos, describing in its dystopia a general contemporary sense of the tiredness of our world's institutions. Its vision is frightening, but its heroine's voice offers a moving testament to the power of language to transform reality in order to overcome oppressive designs imposed on human beings. This effort to maintain freedom of imagination places The Handmaid's Tale in dialogue with a particular philosophical tradition in the modern American novel while, at the same time, it transcends any national or traditional context through its feminist dialogics. Though she is frequently described by literary critics as a writer impossible to "pigeonhole" (Ingersoll 525)—simultaneously a "feminist, nationalist, literary witch, mythological poet, satirist, formulator of critical theories" (Fulford 95) about whom there "is no real accord concerning her tone or attitude, her point of view" (Mandel 53)—obviously, as a Canadian writer, she cannot be read apart from that context. Indeed, she is self-consciously [End Page 302] Canadian; in her poetry, novels, interviews, and essays, she emphasizes her rootedness in Canadian literature, both in the Canadian landscape itself and in broad cultural issues. She has promoted understanding of Canadian writers in copyright cases. But The Handmaid's Tale is about America: It is set in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Atwood lived while attending graduate school; it is about American-style fundamentalist religion; and its narrative enacts a hermeneutics typical of American novels. Atwood told an interviewer that The Handmaid's Tale was the first major work she set in America and that she made this choice of setting because she "'couldn't fly it in Canada.'" She realized that the religious fundamentalism of The Handmaid's Tale's future America, Gilead, "[is] not a Canadian sort of thing to do. Canadians might do it after the States did it in some sort of watered down version. Our television evangelists are more paltry than yours. The States are more extreme in everything. The Canadian joke goes something like, there's a road to heaven and there's a signpost on the road and one arrow says to heaven and the other says panel discussion about heaven, and all the Canadians choose the second." She also remarks that "'everyone watches the States to see what the country is doing and might be doing ten or fifteen years from now,'" but she continues with a more significant historical context for her chosen setting: "'And then they are my ancestors. Those nagging Puritans really are my ancestors. So I had a considerable interest in them when I was studying them, and the mindset of Gilead is really close to that of the seventeenth century Puritans'" (qtd. in Lyons 72–73). This work's most telling connection to American novels is precisely its post...

Modernity and the Great Depression: The Transformation of American Society, 1930–1941 by Kenneth J. Bindas

Reviewed by: Modernity and the Great Depression: The Transformation of American Society, 1930–1941 by Kenneth J. Bindas David Welky Modernity and the Great Depression: The Transformation of American Society, 1930–1941. By Kenneth J. Bindas. CultureAmerica. ( Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017. Pp. [x], 277. $39.95, ISBN 978–0-7006–2400-3.) Modernity and modernism, as historians have understood at least since Richard Brown published his seminal Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600–1865 (New York, 1976), are more than temporal concepts. Modern not only is synonymous with now but also conveys values and principles that help societies interpret the world around them. Historian Kenneth J. Bindas draws heavily from contemporary magazines, newspapers, and other printed sources to argue that the Great Depression marked the zenith of modernism in America. Unlike historians who stress the sociocultural continuities between the 1930s and previous decades, Bindas maintains that the economic collapse created space for a new worldview called modernism, which preached that rationalism, order, planning, and progress were the keys to solving contemporary problems and ushering in a brighter future. This brand of modernism had both secular and sacred roots. It emerged from the technological advances of the early twentieth century, the efficiency movement epitomized by Frederick Taylor, the writings of technocratic thinkers, and the ideas of liberal Christians seeking up-to-date methods of perfecting society. Ultimately, modernism became a kind of civic religion, steeped in a language of salvation—as evidenced by, for example, Franklin D. Roosevelt's appropriation of biblical metaphors in his first inaugural address—that was fixated on improving this world rather than accessing the next one. Bindas acknowledges that modernism is a slippery concept that meant different things to different people and was more of a zeitgeist than a fixed set of principles. He links the search for rationalism, order, planning, and progress to four areas of 1930s America: the New Deal, the world's fairs, interior decoration, and music. The Civilian Conservation Corps, for example, inculcated young Americans with the belief that centralized direction could transform virgin nature into organized, useful, and communally beneficial spaces. World's fairs highlighted the social importance of rational-minded scientists whose research paved the way toward a future without shortages or suffering. Modernism's grip loosened in the 1960s and 1970s, in part because of the return of prosperity. Americans watching their new televisions in suburban living rooms grew suspicious of modernist values such as community and centralized planning. Moreover, modernism became a victim of its own success. Americans had been told that modernism would create a utopia. When that failed to materialize and as the protests of the 1960s exposed lingering fissures in the country's social fabric, the disillusioned turned inward and sought meaning in individualism, laissez-faire conservatism, New Age spiritualism, and other antimodern philosophies. What was once revolutionary had become stale and square. Bindas's thesis is compelling, and his well-drawn examples point to the importance of the loose conglomeration of concepts called modernism. While this reviewer appreciates his focused treatment, one wishes he had expanded his exploration in a few additional directions. A more thorough analysis of [End Page 207] modernism in Hollywood film seems crucial to the larger picture. Although Bindas briefly addresses the modernist bent of cowboy movies, the topic seems ripe for further discussion. Moreover, while he astutely shows how modernism repackaged traditionalist ideas for a new generation, a deeper treatment of how modernism coexisted with the various traditionalist movements of the age would have been welcome. Finally, the author implies connections between capitalism, consumerism, and modernism; the world's fairs that promoted reason and order also sold products and enhanced brand awareness. Modernism, it seems, was at times as much a business venture as a social blueprint. A clearer demonstration of how these forces intermingled and of the ramifications of those interactions might shed light on the tensions that animated the modernist impulse. Nevertheless, Bindas's provocative and imaginative interpretation of a crucial moment in the development of contemporary America is both thoughtful and thought provoking, opening new avenues of inquiry for future historians. David Welky University of Central Arkansas Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association...

Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South by Michael W. Fitzgerald

Reviewed by: Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South by Michael W. Fitzgerald Amanda Brickell Bellows (bio) Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South. By Michael W. Fitzgerald. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. 451 Cloth, $49.95.) Michael W. Fitzgerald's Reconstruction in Alabama offers a new interpretation of the period of Reconstruction (1865–77) in Alabama. No historian has produced a comparable narrative since the publication of Walter Lynwood Fleming's Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama in 1905. Fitzgerald seeks to present a more "reliable, modern account" than that of Fleming by exploring the ways in which different groups of Alabamians worked together across racial lines to achieve particular political and economic objectives during the period of Reconstruction (2). He also identifies historical moments such as the Panic of 1873 and its subsequent depression that resulted in the collapse of interracial cooperation, growing white violence against freedpeople, and the end of Reconstruction with the rise of the Democratic Party. A professor of history at St. Olaf College, Fitzgerald joins a host of American scholars who have produced revisionist histories of Reconstruction in recent years that challenge the Dunning school's critique of Radical Republicans. With its emphasis on politics, economic policies, and collective action, Fitzgerald's methodological approach is akin to that of Eric Foner and Steven Hahn, whose works he admires. But Reconstruction in Alabama differs from Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988) and Hahn's A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003) because of the author's specific focus on the connections between economic instability, political violence, and class divisions. Fitzgerald recognizes the "centrality of racial reaction in Reconstruction politics" but primarily seeks to show in his book how "sharp divisions among whites [End Page 349] over development policy, and subsequently over how to avoid state bankruptcy, opened avenues of political influence to African Americans" (3). As pragmatic politicians, he argues, black Republicans exploited divisions among whites to form a political coalition that crossed racial boundaries. Black Republicans joined hill-country Unionists and carpetbaggers, for instance, in an effort to achieve their aims. Thus Fitzgerald's history offers insight into the unifying forces and schisms that alternately brought together or separated different social groups during Reconstruction in a state-based case study that he anticipates will provide "a vantage point for broader reflection on the state of Reconstruction scholarship, and on its meaning for contemporary America" (1). Reconstruction in Alabama is divided into three parts comprising twelve chapters organized chronologically. Each of the chapters assesses a particular topic that sheds light on the evolving political and economic conditions at different points during Reconstruction. Freedpeople receive less attention in the first part than in the second and third parts, a strategy Fitzgerald employs in order to assess divisions among white Alabamians early on. Drawing from materials in archives located primarily in the South, North, and Midwest, Fitzgerald examines diaries, correspondence, Confederate applications for presidential pardons, judicial records, newspapers, and more. His concentrated approach and broad source base enable him to present a long-overdue analysis of the individuals and forces that defined and shaped the period of Reconstruction in Alabama. In chapter 1, Fitzgerald outlines the different political constituencies in prewar and wartime Alabama, while in chapter 2 he studies the consequences of Union occupation and the effect on local populations. Chapters 3 and 4 cover Presidential Reconstruction, the activities of Unionists, and the governorship of Robert Miller Patton between 1865 and 1868. Fitzgerald transitions from the political maneuverings of white Alabamians to the mobilization of freedpeople in chapter 5, which marks the beginning of part 2. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 deal with the connections between Republican governor William Hugh Smith's championing of railroad construction and the ways in which violence against freedpeople pervaded Alabama during his term. In chapter 9, Fitzgerald discusses improvements in labor conditions for blacks and whites during Democratic governor Robert Burns Lindsay's term (1870–72), and in chapter 10 he analyzes the recovery of the plantation economy, the election of...

Re-animating church as politics:South Africa commemorating the radical reformation in the hope of decolonizing local congregations

An unlikely crosscurrent in the Reformation-schism was the violent reaction of both the Reformation and Roman Catholic establishments in the 1520s to Anabaptist Churches. What evoked this reaction was the Anabaptists’ recognizably distinct church polity, which the Radical Reformers understood to be directly continuous with the socially transformative politics of Jesus and of the first Christians of the Roman Empire. In a spirit of contrition for Christian disunity, this research is a commemoration that aims to identify prophetic aspects of early Anabaptist polity. Secondly, the essay demonstrates that the way the Radical Reformers practised church is pertinent for ecclesiology five centuries later – not least in contemporary South Africa and North America where church capture to neoliberal economic values and commitments prior to following Jesus, calls into question orthodox Christian witness and presence. Thirdly, the essay imagines a South African re-appropriation of the politics of Jesus as amplified in the Radical Reformation tradition, in a tentative, heuristic invitation to the Church in South Africa today, to become ‘God’s left wing’.

Sound, Vision, and Embodied Performativity in Beyoncé Knowles’ Visual Album Lemonade (2016)

In 2016, Beyonce published Lemonade, a work of art that exists in various manifestations: as a music album that includes twelve songs, as live performances (including her world tour and her appearance at the Superbowl halftime show), and as a “visual album,” an art film that consists of the music video clips for each individual song and visually and auditorily complex “chapters” which feature the poetry by Warsan Shire. This article focuses on the visual album as intermedial artwork that can be described as a soundscape in which the intermedial constellations fulfill a number of functions: Firstly, intermedial references are a means of cohesion that are responsible for the unified character of the visual album. Secondly, intermedial references result in a transcultural signature of the artwork. Thirdly, through intermedial references Beyonce locates Lemonade within the cultural history of the United States and American music history in particular. Finally, intermediality acquires cultural-critical functions which in particular pertain to race relations and structural forms of discrimination against people of color in contemporary America.

Myths of meritocracy: caste, karma and the new racism, a comparative study

ABSTRACTThe discourse of karma (behaviour), confounded with inherent psychic and material substance of the person/group (guna), was at the heart of India’s caste ideology. This systematic and intuitive, albeit convoluted and phantasmic doctrine was critical to bridge the discrepancy between a pantheistic religious imaginary and the reality of exclusion and abjection. Although “karma” evokes an exotic orient, this ideology is near identical with the ideas of “idleness” and “instant gratification” used to make sense of racial inequities in the contemporary United States. In both cases, the idea of behavioural and moral deficiency is used to justify evident abjection and discrimination, within the frame of an encompassing ideology of social equality. Thus, this use of the notions of “work” and “discipline”, extrapolated to the moral quality of the group or individual, is no passing argument of the “new racism”. It is a proven ploy of assigning blame on the victim.

‘Precolonial Studies’: Emily Erikson on the English East India Company, the Advantages of Network Theory and the Rise of Populism in Contemporary United States

This interview with network theorist Emily Erikson took place in March 2017 when she visited Habib University in Karachi, Pakistan, for a lecture on the English East India Company. She talks about the advantages of network theory, the challenges of Twitter research and the reasons for the success of the English East India Company, which—according to Erikson—cannot be successfully explained by using a European cultures versus South Asian cultures framework. It also touches upon the critique of corporations in general and the possible links between globalisation and the rise of populism in the United States. Emily Erikson teaches sociology at Yale University and works on social networks and the development of institutions of capitalism and democracy. Her award-winning book Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company (Princeton University Press, 2014) shows how an informal social network linking autonomous employees fostered the company’s long-term success, shedding light on the processes underpinning the emergence of early multinational firms and the structure of early modern global trade. Her forthcoming book New Knowledge: The Rise of Economics and Development of the Public Sphere identifies the causes stimulating the development of pre-classical economic thought in the seventeenth century. Erikson serves on the council for economic sociology of the American Sociological Association and on the executive council of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. In addition, she serves on the editorial boards of Social Science History, Relational Sociology Series (Palgrave MacMillan), and is a founding member of the advisory board for the Journal of Historical Network Research.

Impossible Futures: Fictions of Risk in the Longue Durée

This essay intervenes in current ecocritical debates about the relationship between fiction and environmental risk by analyzing the limits of risk theory in the deep time of the Anthropocene. Although contemporary ecocriticism argues that we must move from apocalyptic depictions of risk to realistic ones, this essay examines fictions of nuclear waste commissioned by the Department of Energy to show that a risk-based realism is used to maintain the status quo of settler colonialism. It then turns to a countermodeling of the futures of nuclear waste by Leslie Marmon Silko in Almanac of the Dead (1991), where uranium’s longue duree future, impossible to imagine from a human perspective, recasts the present as a space in which the unlikely, implausible, and unrealistic saturate the everyday. For Silko, the apocalyptic futurelessness that nuclear waste seeds into our present is a vital formal resource for unsettling colonial realism in the contemporary United States.

Back to the Fifties: Nostalgia, Hollywood Film, and Popular Music of the Seventies and Eighties by Michael D. Dwyer (review)

Reviewed by: Back to the Fifties: Nostalgia, Hollywood Film, and Popular Music of the Seventies and Eighties by Michael D. Dwyer Christopher D. Stone Michael D. Dwyer, Back to the Fifties: Nostalgia, Hollywood Film, and Popular Music of the Seventies and Eighties (New York: Oxford, 2015). The memory of the Fifties continues to loom large. According to PRRI, a polling outfit, few matters separated Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton voters more than their view of the relationship between the Fifties and contemporary America. Whereas 70% of Clinton partisans believed American life had improved since the 1950s, 72% of Trump supporters believed the country had declined. Undoubtedly, many Trump voters see the Fifties as a time of national greatness, an era of consensus, strength, and prosperity (especially for blue-collar whites without a college degree), and as a time worth recreating. Such sentiments echo conservative rhetoric of the 1980s and 1990s, rhetoric that often drew strength from popular culture, even as popular culture contained multiple visions of the Fifties, including ones decidedly hostile to conservative aspirations. It is this fertile ground that Dwyer cultivates. Dwyer’s plow is not the first to break such ground. Daniel Marcus’ Happy Days and Wonder Years (2004) is a particularly important antecedent, but whereas Marcus privileges punditry and political oratory, Dwyer favors “pop nostalgia,” which he defines through three attributes. First, it relies on commercial media and seeks a mass audience. Second, it uses music, fashion, and other tropes to signify a coveted past, sometimes with questionable historical authenticity. Third, pop nostalgia resides not just with cultural texts and their audiences, but also within the complex, dynamic interplay that conjoins them. Dwyer applies these concepts to the Fifties, which he distinguishes from the 1950s. His Fifties is an idea, a construction that houses multiple, often competing memories. It is also chronologically more expansive than the 1950s, stretching from 1945 to 1963. In analyzing how popular culture negotiated the Fifties, Dwyer limits his attention to music and film from what he terms the Reagan Era (1973–1988). Aside from enriching our understanding of that particular period, Dwyer looks to complicate the relationship between history and nostalgia. He does not cast the two as mortal enemies and he stresses that nostalgia has its own meaningful history to chart. Moreover, Dwyer seeks to demonstrate the ways in which texts travel through time and acquire new meanings as they interface with new technologies and historical contexts. Dwyer pursues these objectives over five chapters. His approach is hardly exhaustive. He ignores or barely mentions a bevy of relevant texts (some quite noteworthy). Examples include Animal House (1978), Dirty Dancing (1987), Queen’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” (1979), the career of the Stray Cats, and hit covers such as “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” (1981), “La Bamba” (1987), and “Don’t Be Cruel” (1988). These omissions may irk some readers, but Dwyer’s highly selective approach allows him to develop his examples fully, which he does most successfully over two chapters dissecting Back to the Future (1985) and American Graffiti (1973). Dwyer’s chapter on George Lucas’s commercial breakthrough is particularly strong. Here, as throughout the book, he carefully dissects his text and makes good use of the work of other scholars. In this case, he uses the trajectories of Curt Henderson (Richard Dreyfuss) and John Milner (Paul Le Mat) to unlock the film’s underlying messages (be open to the new and remain wary of nostalgia’s seductive lure). What truly distinguishes this chapter, however, is its [End Page 80] success in connecting textual analysis with the book’s broader objectives, such as plotting out the shifting meaning of texts. For reviewers in 1973, American Graffiti, while giving the past its due, defined the transition from the Fifties as a moment of political and cultural maturation. After 1977, on the other hand, many commentators interpreted the film as an indirect assault on the Sixties or as an unwelcome precursor to the age of blockbusters—readings forged in a very different context, one marked by the ascendency of the New Right and the incredible success of Star Wars (1977). The final three chapters generally cast a wider net...

Review of New Body Politics: Narrating Arab and Black Identity in the Contemporary United States

No abstract available.

Federalism on Trial: State Attorneys General and National Policymaking in Contemporary America. By Paul Nolette. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015. 296p. $39.95 cloth.

Federalism on Trial: State Attorneys General and National Policymaking in Contemporary America. By Paul Nolette. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015. 296p. $39.95 cloth.