American Studies Scholars Research Articles

Enhanced by Technology: New Directions in American Studies Scholarship

Enhanced by Technology:New Directions in American Studies Scholarship Andrew M. Wentink (bio) The American Antiquarian Society's conference "Histories of Print, Manuscript, and Performance in America," the 2005 offering in the society's ongoing program in the History of the Book in American Culture, offered an irresistible array of presentations directly related to my [End Page 375] personal research. Scholarly presentations on "how the verbal arts of print, manuscript, and performance reflected and influenced each other, often in unpredictable ways, in pre-twentieth-century America" promised to inform my work in American cultural history, primarily in the field of social and theatrical dance. In my capacity as an archivist and special collections librarian, I was eager to learn to what degree the kind of primary source materials I promote to American Literature and Studies faculty in their teaching and research were represented in the papers presented by scholars on the panel. The presentations, with few exceptions, exceeded my expectations. I left the conference inspired by the exciting new direction in American studies scholarship that challenges print-driven media history through the innovative use of a diverse range of primary source materials and embraces the invaluable contribution electronic and digital technologies have made in the advancement of scholarly research tools. Overall, the conference revealed how the evolution of American political, civic, domestic, religious, and cultural identities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was shaped by a broad development in media and performance technologies. Grouped into panels according to related themes, presenters discussed new technologies in text and performance as agents of change for the most critical issues in the evolution of the American experience—democracy, race, gender, individualism, religion, education, westward expansion/manifest destiny, national identity/ nationalism, industry and commerce, and popular culture. In considering the broader interpretation of "text" as "textual media"—especially in connection with a broadly conceived definition of performance—papers revealed multiple intersections of print and new technologies with public and private performance in a full range of spheres of performance: public square, battlefield, prison, the floor of Congress, pulpit, theater, schoolroom, library and lyceum, the home, and, finally, the interior of the heart, mind, and soul of the individual. One of the most compelling concepts to emerge collectively from these presentations was the proposition that, rather than resulting in the depersonalization of the individual, new media and performative technologies augment, enhance, reveal, and even probe, dimensions of the self within interior landscapes. Given the consistent high quality of scholarship at the conference, it is difficult to select individual presentations for mention. It was fascinating to see how often papers complemented and/or responded to each [End Page 376] other. Question and answer sessions, as well as discussions at lunches, dinners, and receptions, continued the lively and compelling intellectual discourse. My assessment of the conference would not be complete, however, without mention of several presentations that left a lasting impression on me. In "Speaking Our Way to Improvement," Joan Radner (Literature, American University) described education as a collaborative lifelong effort among members of rural New England debating societies; democratic "crazy quilts of local society" that permitted an equal voice and "cultural cross-dressing" through oral reading of papers of anonymous authorship. Lloyd Pratt (English and African American Studies, Yale University) proposed in "Semiprivate Space and a Democracy of Race" that the appearance by Frederick Douglass at the Nantucket Anti-Slavery Convention represents how the democratization of public institutions coincided with the disenfranchisement of African Americans and, furthermore, that what allowed the possibility of Douglass's participation in the antislavery movement was the support of a semiprivate organization that "could and should exclude part of the population." In her moving presentation "Silenced Women and Silent Language in Early African- and Anglo-American Newspapers," Joycleyn Moody (English, St. Louis University) argued that slave narratives were reshaped by amanuenses of the American Tract Society and, as abolitionist constructs packaged for white men's ends, did not reflect the real voices or identities of enslaved women. In "Reading the Image: Visual Culture as Print Culture and the Performance of the Bourgeois Self," Laura Schiavo (Director of Museum Programs, Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington) argued that the revolution...

Drug Wars and Wonder Drugs

Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics. By Curtis Marez. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 347 pages. $59.95 (cloth). $19.95 (paper). Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs. By Jonathan Michel Metzl. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. 275 pages. $24.95 (cloth). $10.95 (paper). At a certain moment in the 1960s, it would not have been surprising to hear reports of counterculture avatars such as Timothy Leary or Ken Kesey calling on Americans to alter their consciousness with drugs—to "turn on, tune in, and drop out." The call was to hedonism, but it also had a distinctive political undercurrent: if enough minds could be liberated through drugs, revolutionary social change would inevitably follow. The key was to take illegal "consciousness-expanding" drugs such as marijuana and LSD, and not commercially produced tranquilizers and other legal agents of conformity. In this psychic politics, control over access to drugs loomed as more important than control over the means of production. This kind of rhetoric seems impossibly dated forty years later. Illicit drugs may still have their partisans, but they do not tend to be social revolutionaries, and antidrug campaigns (and advertisements for commercial medicines) far outweigh them in cultural visibility and influence. The notion that drugs hold some essential key to higher consciousness and social transformation seems laughable and—in an era of reenergized antidrug campaigning—downright dangerous for anyone foolish enough to espouse it too loudly. If paeans to illegal drugs have fallen out of vogue in the mass media, however, skepticism about drugs and drug control have persisted in the far less celebrated realm of academic scholarship—and for good reason. Since the 1950s, hundreds of millions of Americans have taken prescription mood medicines (psychotropes) such as Valium or Prozac each year, altering perceptions of "the good life" and helping make the pharmaceutical industry one of the mightiest sectors of the U.S. economy. Meanwhile, recent presidential elections [End Page 1231] testify to the continuing significance of the twentieth century's "wars against drugs": the margins of victory have, by some measures, been smaller than the number of drug-crime felons (disproportionately nonwhite) ineligible to vote. It does not take a drug evangelist to recognize that consciousness and the chemical means to alter it have been, and remain, important arenas of cultural and political striving and conflict. The "war against drugs" and the psychotropic phenomenon receive new and valuable attention from Curtis Marez's Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics and Jonathan Metzl's Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs. Both books trace how and why particular groups of Americans—police, immigrant laborers, psychiatrists—worked to establish drugs as a public spectacle, infusing them with intense and often contradictory political valences. Marez argues that both state agents and "subaltern" insurgents exploited drugs as a cultural terrain for developing and contesting ideas about imperial power relationships (9). Metzl, examining medical and popular representations of psychotropes since the 1950s, finds them populated by gendered images and discourses supposedly vanquished from American psychiatry when "wonder pills" replaced psychoanalysis (7). Drug Wars and Prozac on the Couch look beyond drug takers to drugs' many other "users": those who sell, police, prescribe, or tell stories about drugs through advertisements, antidrug campaigns, music, memoirs, and so forth. These "users" leveraged drugs' powerful but ambiguous psychic effects into even more potent political, economic, and cultural ones. Metzl and Marez, then, model how American studies scholars might look to cultural analysis of drugs as part of a wide range of inquiries, rather than only within the specialized field of drug history. Marez and Metzl are part of a larger trend in drug scholarship. Several scholars, for example, analyze how stories about addicts and crime have been used to dramatize race and gender stereotypes, shaping the nature and extent of police control over poor or nonwhite cityscapes.1 Others identify international drug trafficking—legal and illegal—as a financial pillar of...

Class and Culture

I imagine that most scholars working in American studies would agree that U.S. culture promotes a deep denial about the determinative power of as an economic, social, and political category. American public discourse and the mass media continue to advance the exceptionalist notion that the United States is a resoundingly middle-class, even classless, society. And as the 2004 presidential elections confirmed, mainstream politicians on both sides of the aisle continue to couch their appeals to the middle classes, but almost never to the working classes or the poor. What may be more surprising to many American studies scholars, however, is that this public silence about has for the most part been echoed in the American Studies Association. According to a survey of conference programs by Janet Zandy, one of a handful of literary scholars who has steadfastly championed working-class studies over the last two decades, has been a marginal category at recent ASA meetings. In 1999 in Montreal, only 3 of the 196 sessions contained titles that either listed as a term or suggested a primary focus on class; in 2004 in Atlanta, the same was true for just 6 out of 275 sessions.1 Panel titles are, admittedly, inadequate indicators of the overall consciousness about at the conferences, yet the striking absence of in those titles suggests that although the category has for several years been a primary axis in the race, gender, and class triad, it has all too often been at best a secondary concern for most Americanists. However, some signs including the two rich and multifaceted books reviewed here suggest that new economic, social, and intellectual forces may be challenging the long-standing elision of from civic dialogue and academic study. As the insecurity brought about by corporate downsizing and the casualization of labor spreads across the economy, the language of

Literature and the Politics of Native American Studies

In a Panel Entitled “American (Indian) Studies: Can the Asa be an Intellectual Home?” at the 2002 Meeting of the American Studies Association, three Native Americanists—Robert Warrior, Philip Deloria, and Jean O'Brien—addressed the relation of their field to the broader terrain of American studies. Each remarked on the tenuous place of Native American studies in the academy, manifested by the underrepresentation of Indian faculty members, the existence of only two institutions granting PhDs in the field, the small number of scholarly journals devoted to Native issues, and neglect by other scholars, even those working in American and ethnic studies. Together, these problems create an institutional situation that Warrior labeled “intellectual homelessness,” in which “Native scholars … don't really belong anywhere” (“Room” 683). Yet these problems also suggest disparities between the questions that define Native studies and those that underlie scholarship in American studies as well as in conventional disciplines. If the marginalization of American Indian studies in academia, as these scholars suggested, reflects the place of Native peoples in United States society, so too does Native politics shape intellectual work in the field.

Hartz and Minds: The Liberal Tradition after the Cold War

The Liberal Tradition in America is truly an exceptional book. Its conceptual framework has been widely criticized as wrongheaded, and each of its organizing theses has been held to be historically inaccurate. Nonetheless, it continues to figure as a central text for scholars in political studies and American studies. We teach it regularly in graduate seminars, allow the problems it raises to shape our research agendas, and organize symposia to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. Indeed, it is tempting to suggest that, if nothing else, Louis Hartz long ago proved that it is more desirable to be interesting than to be right. To that end, I write here to register an appreciation of his work even as I acknowledge the aptness of much of the criticism to which it has been subjected. To my mind, a Hartz who has been refined and reframed by decades of criticism can still offer valuable insight into America and America's engagement with the world, particularly in a moment of caustic political and sharp economic divisions that would seem to belie the consensus he emphasized, and in the midst of the emergence of forthrightly illiberal doctrines shaping both American domestic and foreign policy.

Intricate relations: sexual and economic desire in American fiction, 1789-1814

Intricate Relations charts the development of the novel in and beyond the early republic in relation to these two thematic and intricately connected centers: sexuality and economics. By reading fiction written by Americans between 1789 and 1814 alongside medical theory, political and economic tracts, and pedagogical literature of all kinds, Karen Weyler re-creates and illuminates the larger, sometimes opaque, cultural context in which novels were written, published, and read. In 1799, the novelist Charles Brockden Brown used the evocative phrase intricate to describe the complex imbrication of sexual and economic relations in the early republic. Exploring these relationships, he argued, is the chief job of the moral historian, a label that most novelists of the era embraced. In a republic anxious about burgeoning individualism in the 1790s and the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the novel foregrounded sexual and economic desires and explored ways to regulate the manner in which they were expressed and gratified. In Intricate Relations, Weyler argues that understanding how these issues underlie the novel as a genre is fundamental to understanding both the novels themselves and their role in American literary culture. Situating fiction amid other popular genres illuminates how novelists such as Charles Brockden Brown, Hannah Foster, Samuel Relf, Susanna Rowson, Rebecca Rush, and Sally Wood synthesized and iterated many of the concerns expressed in other forms of public discourse, a strategy that helped legitimate their chosen genre and make it a viable venue for discussion in the decades following the revolution. Weyler's passionate and persuasive study offers new insights into the civic role of fiction in the early republic and will be of great interest to literary theorists and scholars in women's and American studies.

Celebrating Freedom and Ethnicity

In recent years, public celebrations have become an important site for scholars to examine nationalism, conflicts, identities, and memories.1 Anthropologists have long considered the importance of rituals, carnivals, and rites of passage in examining the values of community, nation, and people.2 In the last two decades, scholars in American studies, history, literature, cultural studies, ethnic studies, and performance studies have followed their counterparts in anthropology to study the meaning of public rituals and celebrations. Mitch Kachun s Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation CelebrationSy 18081915 andLon Kurashige *s Japanese A merican Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival, 19341990 are groundbreaking new studies that analyze cultural productions to illuminate how minorities used the public space to contest and challenge American national culture and identity. These two volumes are the first booklength works on the history of African American emancipation celebrations and Nisei Week festivals, respectively. While Kachun turns critical attention to the national scale of freedom day celebrations, Kurashige provides a nuanced analysis of a local ethnic celebration in Los Angeles. Although each author pays attention to his particular historical subjects, the works have some similar trajectories. By using an interdisciplinary approach, each author effectively establishes the critical method of analyzing the complexity and contradictory meanings in public celebrations. Informed by ethnic studies, both authors deftly explore how nonwhite groups contested the public space to reconfigure their racialization and ethnicization by crafting a favorable public memory. Ceremonies served to ease racial tensions and to forge a group iden-

Bringing out the Dead: Inside the Arbus Archive

Diane Arbus: Family Albums. Organized by the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and the Spencer Museum of Art, the University of Kansas, September 2003-December 2005, traveling. Exhibition Curators: Anthony W. Lee and John Pultz. Diane Arbus: Family Albums. Edited by Anthony W. Lee and John Pultz. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. 168 pages. $33.00 (paper). Diane Arbus Revelations. October 2003-October 2006, traveling. Exhibition Curators: Sandra S. Philips and Elisabeth Sussman. Diane Arbus Revelations. Edited by Doon Arbus and Elisabeth Sussman. New York: Random House, 2003. 352 pages. $100.00 (cloth). Archives attract us with the possibility that they might contain the forgotten masterpiece or revealing documents overlooked by a previous generation. Until very recently, the career of Diane Arbus has been inoculated against this kind of speculation by an estate that has micromanaged access to and interpretation of her work. Outside of museum collections, Arbus became known through three monographs, Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus: Magazine Work, and Untitled, sleek, restrained volumes with minimal commentary and large expanses of white space.1 In spite of the limited canon made available by these books, Arbus has become one of the most well known of all modern photographers. Although they may not shock viewers as they did during her first museum show in 1971, her photographs of identical twins, midgets, transvestites, and giants still have the capacity to inspire an unforgettable mixture of discomfort and admiration. Add to this the mystique surrounding Arbus's short life and death by suicide, which framed her as a tragic figure doomed by the intensity of her artistic vision. In fall 2003 Arbus returned to the public eye with the opening of two exhibits, Diane Arbus: Family Albums, curated by Anthony W. Lee and John Pultz, and Diane Arbus Revelations, curated by Sandra S. [End Page 207] Philips and Elisabeth Sussman. Together, they present Arbus's life and work as compelling terrain for scholars of American studies. Not only do Arbus's photographs make visible the underworlds and subcultures that have been central to revisionist histories of the 1950s and 1960s, but her legacy, which has been the subject of ongoing debate, should be of interest to critics concerned with the fate of the arts in contemporary American culture. Arbus's career began in the 1950s as one half of a husband-and-wife team of fashion photographers. When she left the partnership to focus on her own career, she repudiated the aesthetic and social values of the fashion industry. As one of the only women street photographers of her time, she documented the lives of nudists, carnies, strippers, and local eccentrics, and shot portraits of some of the era's most famous personalities. From well-known events and people to those forgotten on the margins of society, her subjects testify to the rapid transformations taking place in midcentury America. Even to those unfamiliar with Arbus's name, her distinctive style is recognizable: the snapshot aesthetic; the large, square format; and the signature uneven black border would have a profound influence on the formal features of modern photography. And many who are unfamiliar with the work are aware of the legend of Diane Arbus. Like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, other famous suicidal women artists of her generation, Arbus rose to posthumous celebrity based as much on the mythology surrounding her life as on the merits of her photography. The notorious silence of those managing her estate only compounded the fascination of fans and critics, who tended either to focus explicitly on formal analysis of Arbus's published work or to posit biographical connections between the photographs and the artist's own psychological turmoil. The long silence was finally broken by Family Albums and Revelations, the first major exhibits of Arbus's photography since a 1972 retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Each is accompanied by a book of photographs containing new essays about her life and work. Almost diametrically opposed in scope and intention...

The Animal Question

Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory . By Cary Wolfe. Foreword by W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 240 pages. $49.00 (cloth), $18.00 (paper). Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal . Edited by Cary Wolfe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. 203 pages. 10 halftones. $56.95 (cloth), $18.95 (paper). Peter Singer's call for animal rights in 1975 began with a bold statement in Animal Liberation that linked the "tyranny" of animal oppression with slavery: "This tyranny has caused and today is still causing an amount of pain and suffering that can only be compared with that which resulted from the centuries of tyranny by white humans over black humans."1 The practice of "speciesism," according to Singer, must therefore be condemned as analogous to racism and sexism. Whether these explicit links are plausible or not continues to be debated, but the last quarter century has certainly seen increased attention to the plight of animals in American culture. Only recently, though, has this ethical impulse gained currency within the humanities. The time may seem right, then, for similarly bold statements from critics such as Cary Wolfe, whose two new books call for interventions into the question of the animal. In Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory, for example, Wolfe suggests that "much of what we call cultural studies situates itself squarely, if only implicitly, on what looks . . . more and more like a fundamental repression that underlies most ethical and political discourse: repressing the question of nonhuman subjectivity, taking it for granted that the subject is always already human" (1). Wolfe's approach is a far cry from that of Peter Singer, a figure who comes under critical scrutiny in Animal Rites, and the form of posthumanist ethics advocated by Wolfe is not likely to be found in the rhetoric of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) or the ALF (Animal Liberation Front), two organizations created in the aftermath of Singer's landmark book. But Animal Rites, along with Wolfe's edited collection Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, offers provocative [End Page 1125] grounds for rethinking such fundamental issues as subjectivity, language, and even humanism itself, particularly through a range of theoretical frameworks that should be of interest to scholars from a variety of fields, including American studies, ethics, science studies, animal rights, and ecology, as well as literary theory and criticism. Wolfe's work is not alone in calling attention to the animal in recent years. A growing number of humanities and social sciences scholars have continued to explore questions related to animals and the human-animal binary, although few are as wide ranging or perhaps field defining as Wolfe.2 What might also be surprising, as Wolfe points out in his introduction to Zoontologies, is that theorists not otherwise known for their interest in animals have also been exploring these issues for a number of years, including Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek, Stanley Cavell, Georges Bataille, René Girard, bell hooks, Michael Taussig, Etienne Balibar, Donna Haraway, Katherine Hayles, and Evelyn Fox Keller (ix-x). While decades of research in animal cognition and ethology have undermined any attempt to define the "essential" difference between "the human" and "the animal" (tool use, language, altruism, and so on), the larger question for scholars in American studies, in my view, would appear to be whether "species" can simply be added to race, class, gender, and sexuality as an equivalent identity category, or even whether all of these traditional categories are founded upon a larger framework of speciesism or discrimination against nonhuman animals. Many theorists stop short of what might be called a species critique, suggesting instead that the site of "the animal" is crucial most importantly in the formation and negotiation of human identity and power structures. But the intersections of these arguments provide rich grounds for further inquiry. Wolfe's Animal Rites is a particularly useful place to...

Giving Up "Indians"

Indian Giving: Economies of Power in Indian-White Exchanges. By David Murray. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. Since the publication of Roy Harvey pearce's acclaimed Savagism and Civilization in 1953, Native American scholars have approached the study of Indian and European encounter from, one could argue, two distinct positions. On the one hand, Robert F. Berkhofer Jr.'s influential The White Man's Indian (1978) argues that the "Indian" is culturally constructed, an image of European imaginings. For Berkhofer, the border is a site of incommensurability; the study of "Indians" is always only a study of the European mind. In contradistinction to this well-established tradition that promotes a static model of encounter, recent scholarship has shifted the focus of study in ways that acknowledge the dynamic nature of exchange and, consequently, recognize the border as a site of negotiation.1 David Murray's Indian Giving: Economies of Power in Indian-White Exchanges similarly proceeds from the premise that cross-cultural relations are, to a greater or lesser extent, reciprocal in design. However, unlike the bulk of scholarship in Native American studies that focuses almost exclusively on [End Page 271] the accord and mutual understanding produced in the wake of encounter, Indian Giving also attends to the loss—misinterpretation, mistranslation—that takes place alongside these same instances of accommodation. The title is, of course, suggestive of the book's primary intention; the phrase "Indian giving" entails the parallel actions of giving and taking, loss and gain. Before turning to the epistemological and political implications of Murray's theoretical commitments, I want to briefly outline the scope and content of the book's seven chapters. As those familiar with Murray's work have come to expect, Indian Giving is the product of extensive research and meticulous scholarship, and in this, the author's second book-length study, the reader is presented with a project that is as ambitious as it is broadly conceived: "This book is about value and the circulation of value, within and across cultures. More specifically, it is about what was given and exchanged in early encounters between Europeans and Indians and how these transactions were understood and represented on each side" (1). Indian Giving engages a wide range of texts—from the canonical work of Roger Williams to lesser-known texts such as the writings of Protestant missionary David Brainerd—to explore acts of giving and exchange in seventeenth-century Indian and European encounter in the Northeast. In addition, although the book focuses primarily on the seventeenth century, its scope spans from the late fifteenth century (Columbus) to the middle of the nineteenth century (Melville). After a lengthy introduction to theories of the gift and exchange, the succeeding chapters consider the struggle for sovereignty and power, the creation and translation of word lists, the uses of wampum, and the process of religious conversion. Murray is particularly attentive to the way objects/signs take on value and circulate in a particular system—religious, linguistic, financial, material—and how these systems overlap in the discursive economy of early encounter. He argues that exchange across cultures takes place within a "set of interlocking and overlapping economies," and as such, the value of what was exchanged became unstable and confused. Subsequently, Murray contends that European attempts to control exchanges by imposing ordering systems to "fix" the circulation of meaning and value were, in the end, unsuccessful. By virtue [End Page 272] of operating within economies that are inextricably intertwined, what circulated was to a degree uncontainable. Something always got lost in the exchange. In "Abundance and Traces," Murray turns his attention to an area where exchange and power might most commonly be witnessed: in expressions of sovereignty and wealth in European accounts of the New World. His reading of Captain John Smith's A Map of Virginia (1612), specifically the coronation scene between Captain Newport and Chief Powhatan, illustrates how European and Indian acts of giving and exchange were not simply attempts at...

"As Others See Us"?: Fetishizing the Foreign at the Whitney

The title of this exhibition, The American Effect: Global Perspectives on the States, 1990-2003, begs for quotation marks around each of its key words: American, Effect, Global, and United States. For American studies scholars, issues of who and what is American, under what circumstances, and with what historical, political, and cultural effects on whom and why, are central to the current debates in the field. So is querying the relationship between the more neutral, state-linked term United States and the more evocative, often mythologized, at times imperial, notion of Thus, in its very premise, this exhibit raises interesting and troubling questions, and in the end it is these questions, not the answers posed by the exhibit itself, that are the most intriguing results of this show. Curated by Lawrence Rinder, The American Effect featured the recent work of forty-seven artists and artist collectives from more than thirty countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and North and South America. Accompanying the show is an exhibition catalog, which features eight essays by Rinder and distinguished scholars and writers, such as Edward Said and Nawal El Saadawi, each exploring broad themes such as Freedom, Abundance, and Hegemony, and written without reference to the specific works in the exhibition.1

Southern Heritage on Display: Public Ritual and Ethnic Diversity within Southern Regionalism

This provocative collection draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to shed light on the role that public ceremonies play in affirming or debunking cultural identities associated with the South. W.J. Cash's 1941 observation that "there are many Souths and many cultural traditions among them" is certainly validated by this book. Although the Civil War and its "lost cause" tradition continues to serve as a cultural root paradigm in celebrations, both uniting and dividing loyalties, southerners also embrace a panoply of public tituals - parades, cook-offs, kinship homecomings, church assemblies, music spectacles, and material culture exhibitions - that affirm other identities. From the Appalachian uplands to the Mississippi Delta, from Kentucky bluegrass to Carolina piedmont, southerners celebrate in festivals that showcase their diverse cultural backgrounds and their mythic beliefs about themselves. The ten essays of this cohesive, interdisciplinary collection present event-centered research from various fields of study - anthropology, geography, history, and literature - to establish a rich, complex picture of the stereotypically "Solid South." Topics include the Mardi Gras Indian song cycle as a means of expressing African-American identity in New Orleans; powwow performances and Native American traditions in southeast North Carolina; religious healings in southern Appalachian communities; Mexican Independence Day festivals in central Florida; and, in eastern Tennessee, bonding ceremonies of melungeons who share Indian, Scots Irish, Mediterranean, and African ancestry. Seen together, these public heritage displays reveal a rich "creole" of cultures that have always been a part of southern life and that continue to affirm a flourishing regionalism. This book will be valuable to students and scholars of cultural anthropology, American studies, and southern history; academic and public libraries; and general readers interested in the American South. It contributes a vibrant, colorful layer of understanding to the continuously emerging picture of complexity in this region historically depicted by simple stereotypes.

Nuestra Los Angeles

In his 1949 book North from Mexico: The Spanish Speaking People of the United States, Carey McWilliams notes that the "settlers" who established Los Angeles in 1781, and whom city elites would later celebrate as "Spanish," were, in fact, two Indians, two mulattos, two Spaniards (each married to an Indian), a Negro, an Indian married to a mulatto, an Indian married to an Indian, a mestizo married to a mulatto, and "'a Chino' . . . probably of Chinese descent" (36).1 Rather than assimilate (or whitewash) Los Angeles's multiracial founders within a Spanish fantasy heritage, as had become common by the time North from Mexico was published, McWilliams notes the racial categories used to classify them. Highlighting their marital status to evoke a doubly mestizo history of Los Angeles, he counteracts the national/racial purity in Spanish origin narratives of the city. From the standpoint of current American studies scholarship, McWilliams's counternarrative of Los Angeles's origins relocates the city's beginnings to an intersection of the Spanish Borderlands, the Black Atlantic, and the Pacific Rim. In all of his writings, McWilliams sought to convey the complexities of the West, California, Southern California, and especially Los Angeles. The range of issues to which he turned his pen remain central to Los Angeles scholars today. "Titles have always bothered me and never more so than in selecting a title for this book. How is one to characterize, in a phrase, a people so diverse in origin?" McWilliams declares in the first sentences of North from Mexico. "I was told that 'Americans from Mexico' would be an appropriate title. . . . [B]ut, strictly speaking, the Spanish-language minority did not come from Spain and Mexico," he continues. "They were already very much a part of the landscape when the Anglo-Americans came to the Southwest. . . . [I]n the end, I was driven to the conclusion that the title would have to refer to a process, a movement, a point on the compass" (7-9). McWilliams would ultimately reconcile the paradoxes of identity inherent to Mexican migration by emphasizing culture as a whole way of life: "For it is the direction in which the people have moved that has given unity to their lives. . . . 'North from Mexico' . . . implies the extension of a way of life rather than a crossing or a jumping of barriers" (10). [End Page 807] McWilliams's solution to the contradiction of a singular national identity that belies great heterogeneity is a useful starting point for a review essay on recent Los Angeles scholarship, for it historicizes key aspects of the city itself, then and now. Additionally, his early attention to the centrality of race—Michael Denning and Nikhil Pal Singh best explain the underappreciated significance of his writing/activism in the history of twentieth-century American pluralism and racial thought—is an enduring issue explored in a great deal of recent L.A. studies scholarship. McWilliams's adroit dismantling of the racial-national assumptions underlying L.A.'s Spanish origin myth offers a glimpse of his constant attention to negative racial signification in order to emphasize systematic racial exclusion and class exploitation as the defining factors in the development of California society. Such historical observations were reconfirmed by his personal experiences. During the early 1930s he wrote articles for national magazines and traveled the state delivering speeches to labor organizations in an effort to stop xenophobic Mexican repatriation campaigns and exploitation in farm labor. As California's chief of the Division of Immigration and Housing from 1939 to 1943, he devised means to hold farmers and growers accountable for their treatment of laborers by increasing labor camp inspections and holding wage-rate hearings (Sachs, 239). In 1943 he used his skills as a lawyer and writer to chair the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee. During the early 1940s he also wrote condemnations of the Japanese internment and the zoot suit riots as incidents that scapegoated Japanese Americans and race-baited Mexican Americans.2 Although McWilliams cited Chicago School figures such as Robert Park or...

Abolition democracy and global justice

As new social relations produce new kinds of social subjects, scholars in American Studies and Area Studies experience anxieties about disciplinary as well as geographic borders. The Civil Rights tradition of the 14th Amendment plays an important role within progressive American Studies scholarship, but in the course of seeking equality and exclusion within the USA, this tradition runs the risk of occluding the role of the nation in the world and its central role in creating and preserving inequality and injustice in other nations. An emerging emphasis on struggles for social justice without seeking state power encapsulates many of the most progressive impulses within Area Studies and transnational studies, yet this perspective runs the risk of occluding the enduring importance of the nation-state in inflecting global developments with local histories and concerns. The present moment challenges us to draw on both traditions, and to use each to critique the shortcomings of the other, while at the same time promoting an inclusionary, nonsectarian, and mutually supportive dialogue about our differences.

Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South

The South has long played a central role in America's national imagination - the site of the trauma of slavery and of a vast nostalgia industry, alternatively the nation's moral other and its moral center. Reconstructing Dixie explores how ideas about the South function within American culture. Narratives of the region often cohere around such tropes as Southern hospitality and the Southern (white) lady. Tara McPherson argues that these discursive constructions tend to conceal and disavow hard historical truths, particularly regarding race relations and the ways racial inequities underwrite Southern femininity. Advocating conceptions of the South less mythologized and more tethered to complex realities, McPherson seeks to bring into view that which is repeatedly obscured - including the South's history of both racial injustice and cross-racial alliance. Illuminating crucial connections between understandings of race, gender and place on the one hand and narrative and images on the other, McPherson reads a number of representations of the South produced from the 1930s to the present. These are drawn from fiction, film, television, southern studies scholarship, popular journalism, music, tourist sites, the internet, and autobiography. She examines modes of affect or ways of feeling revealing how these feelings, along with the narratives and images she discusses, sanction particular racial logics. A wide-ranging cultural studies critique, Reconstructing Dixie calls for vibrant new ways of thinking about the South and for a revamped and reinvigorated southern studies. Reconstructing Dixie will appeal to scholars in American, southern, and cultural studies, and to those in African American, media, and women's studies.

“The same old danger/but a brand new pleasure”: The black arts movement in the 21st century

In the 21st century, African American studies scholarship will become less and less consumed with exploration and documentation of inter-racial differences, and more and more concerned with the relationships between those diverse constituencies that exist within ethnic groups.

Tell this silence: Asian American women writers and the politics of speech

Tell This Silence by Patti Duncan explores multiple meanings of speech and silence in Asian American women's writings in order to explore relationships among race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. Duncan argues that contemporary definitions of U.S. feminism must be expanded to recognize the ways in which Asian American women have resisted and continue to challenge the various forms of oppression in their lives. There has not yet been adequate discussion of the multiple meanings of silence and speech, especially in relation to activism and social-justice movements in the U.S. In particular, the very notion of silence continues to invoke assumptions of passivity, submissiveness, and avoidance, while speech is equated with action and empowerment.However, as the writers discussed in Tell This Silence suggest, silence too has multiple meanings especially in contexts like the U.S., where speech has never been a guaranteed right for all citizens. Duncan argues that writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Mitsuye Yamada, Joy Kogawa, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nora Okja Keller, and Anchee Min deploy silence as a means of resistance. Juxtaposing their OC unofficial narrativesOCO against other historiesOCoofficial U.S. histories that have excluded them and American feminist narratives that have stereotyped them or distorted their participationOCothey argue for recognition of their cultural participation and offer analyses of the intersections among gender, race, nation, and sexuality.Tell This Silence offers innovative ways to consider Asian American gender politics, feminism, and issues of immigration and language. This exciting new study will be of interest to literary theorists and scholars in women's, American, and Asian American studies.

Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, Hartford, Connecticut, October 17, 2003

Urging American studies as a field to address the current international crisis, Kaplan analyzes the dramatic shift in contemporary public discourse from the denial to the embrace of the notion of the American Empire. She traces two dominant narratives, one that loudly champions U.S. military supremacy and another that reluctantly accepts the "white man's burden" as the last best cure of global anarchy, both of which take American exceptionalism to new heights. Since the American Empire is "out of the closet," as its proponents claim, American studies scholars and teachers must go beyond the methodology of exposure to recast these debates about empire in transnational, historical, and comparative contexts. They should muster the authority of their discipline to challenge current efforts to redefine the multiple meanings of America both at home and abroad. She offers two key examples. One explores how the adoption of the word "homeland" imposes an illusion of national consensus and homogeneity, which underwrites resurgent nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment. She concludes with the pressing case of the prisoners held at the U.S. naval base at Guant�namo Bay Cuba, to argue that this imperial location lies at a historical crossroad, where U.S. intervention in the Caribbean meets U.S. intervention in the Middle East, and where nineteenth-century imperialism leads to the American Empire of the twenty-first.

The Incorporation of America Today

The Incorporation of America began as a challenge to myself: how to tell the story of an era-three decades-that would bring together key moments, figures, and developments without regard for conventional disciplinary boundaries, a periodized story that would touch important bases, show relations among them, and do so within a coherent structure. Historians take these decades, the Gilded Age, as a turning point in US history, and I assumed that any account of a turning point requires as broad a selection of evidence as one can reasonably manage. Hence the book's deliberate refusal to fall within any conventionally segregated category, literary or intellectual or socioeconomic or political history, but to draw freely from whatever sources I thought contributed to a picture. To exemplify the interdisciplinary as such was not part of the book's agenda, which aimed only to tell as complete a story as I could about a passage in the of US society and culture. Critical was how I described the project: history in the sense of concreteness and temporality, cultural in the sense of a totality of relations, a whole way of life (whole not as a unified homogenous field but as elements interrelated even where divergent and conflicted), and critical in the sense of skeptical, demystifying, contextual: criticism in the act of becoming, in Adorno's words, physiognomy. Brook Thomas is absolutely right in calling attention to the influence of Raymond Williams, especially his Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961). The Gramscian theory of hegemony was also part of the mix, as were, as David Leverenz and David Shumway observe, the American studies scholarship of Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx. The book emerged from an eclectic culturist theory of with more than a dash of social history. The term incorporation I adopted from political economy for obvious reasons--it names the prime engine of change in the pe-

Southern heritage on display: public ritual and ethnic diversity within southern regionalism

This provocative collection draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to shed light on the role that public ceremonies play in affirming or debunking cultural identities associated with the W.J. Cash's 1941 observation that there are many Souths and many cultural traditions among them is certainly validated by this book. Although the Civil War and its lost cause tradition continues to serve as a cultural root paradigm in celebrations, both uniting and dividing loyalties, southerners also embrace a panoply of public tituals - parades, cook-offs, kinship homecomings, church assemblies, music spectacles, and material culture exhibitions - that affirm other identities. From the Appalachian uplands to the Mississippi Delta, from Kentucky bluegrass to Carolina piedmont, southerners celebrate in festivals that showcase their diverse cultural backgrounds and their mythic beliefs about themselves. The ten essays of this cohesive, interdisciplinary collection present event-centered research from various fields of study - anthropology, geography, history, and literature - to establish a rich, complex picture of the stereotypically Solid South. Topics include the Mardi Gras Indian song cycle as a means of expressing African-American identity in New Orleans; powwow performances and Native American traditions in southeast North Carolina; religious healings in southern Appalachian communities; Mexican Independence Day festivals in central Florida; and, in eastern Tennessee, bonding ceremonies of melungeons who share Indian, Scots Irish, Mediterranean, and African ancestry. Seen together, these public heritage displays reveal a rich creole of cultures that have always been a part of southern life and that continue to affirm a flourishing regionalism. This book will be valuable to students and scholars of cultural anthropology, American studies, and southern history; academic and public libraries; and general readers interested in the American It contributes a vibrant, colorful layer of understanding to the continuously emerging picture of complexity in this region historically depicted by simple stereotypes.