American Studies Scholars Research Articles

“Get in Formation”: Recent Scholarship on Popular Music and American Identities

“Get in Formation”: Recent Scholarship on Popular Music and American Identities Charles L. Hughes (bio) “I Hear America Singing”: Folk Music and National Identity. By Rachel Clare Donaldson. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014. 234pp. $89.50 (cloth). $34.95 (paper). $34.95 (e-book). Natural Acts: Race, Gender, and Rusticity in Country Music. By Pamela Fox. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. 280pp. $80.00 (cloth). $29.95 (paper). Real Men Don’t Sing: Crooning in American Culture. By Allison McCracken. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. 448pp. $99.95 (cloth). $28.95 (paper). Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora. By Shana L. Redmond. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 356pp. $89.00 (cloth). $27.00 (paper). $22.95 (e-book). Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Popular Music. By Eric Weisbard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 312pp. $90.00 (cloth). $27.50 (paper). $27.50 (e-book). In the spring of 2016, the release of Beyoncé’s “Formation” commanded immediate and widespread attention in the American media. Pundits, scholars, and fans discussed the song and its accompanying video as an example of the artist’s paradigm-shifting popularity and as a crucial intervention into contemporary debates over #BlackLivesMatter, feminism, and the broader politics of representation. Beyond this, those who addressed “Formation” placed Beyoncé’s assertive call and multilayered text in a broader conversation about national identity. Some opponents claimed that her message and presentation exploited societal divisions to the point of being un-American, while supporters countered that the artist’s critique of systemic violence and celebration of community among black women reflected both a historical and [End Page 1033] contemporary challenge to the limits of citizenship in the United States. The ease with which Beyoncé became a subject of public debate—and the depth of the conversations she provoked—was only the most recent demonstration of popular music’s continuing historical primacy as a key site through which American experiences are expressed, understood, and contested. Accordingly, popular music has remained a consistent and rich topic of consideration in scholarly discourse as well. Recent years have seen a renaissance of such studies, as historians, ethnomusicologists, and others have produced innovative work that sheds new light on ignored or underappreciated stories, revises or debunks traditional paradigms, and expands our understandings of music’s centrality to the cultural and economic marketplace. By connecting the artistic and commercial impulses that motivate the work of musical laborers to the social and economic processes attendant to listenership, popular-music scholars demonstrate the linked and multivalent roles that music plays within larger shifts in American political and social life. In the words of Shana L. Redmond, whose outstanding book is under review here, “music is a method . . . a complex system of mean(ing)s and ends that mediate our relationships to one another, to space, to our histories and historical moment” (1). Acknowledging and incorporating this methodology is crucial to students and scholars of American studies, a field that has long understood the value of using pop-cultural texts as a central mode. As Redmond reminds us, popular music has been particularly useful for unpacking and understanding the complexities of identity formation in the United States. Scholars have addressed the development of racialized and gendered musical categories, noted the key impacts of class and region on musical phenomena, and traced the ways that musicians, songs, and genres have affirmed, challenged, or rejected concepts of Americanness as both historical and ideological phenomenon. As in other fields, the best work in popular-music studies presents an intersectional analysis of these formations, demonstrating how music—as both art and commodity—reflects and affects these larger structures. Several recent works offer important and innovative additions to this conversation. The question of “Americanness” is at the forefront of Rachel Clare Donaldson’s I Hear America Singing, a meticulous intellectual history of the folk revival of the early to mid-twentieth century. From the 1930s forward, the folk revival promoted the spread of American musical traditions (from spirituals to cowboy songs) through recordings and songbooks, as well as the more general spread of communal music-making practices in the form...

ARCHIVAL SPOTLIGHT

Archival Spotlight Dorothy Berry On November 12 and 13, 2015, the Black Film Center/Archive presented “From Cinematic Past to Fast Forward Present: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation—A Centennial Symposium.” The two days of programming featured panels with some of the leading scholars in African American and cinema studies. A common thread throughout the panels was the question of whether or not The Birth of a Nation (BOAN) should be shown in the year 2015. James Baldwin’s 1976 description of BOAN as both “one of the great classics of the American cinema” and “an elaborate justification of mass murder” succinctly captures the challenges of screening D. W. Griffith’s blockbuster film.1 There is no denying the seminal role of BOAN in American film history. There is also no denying the seminal role of BOAN in the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and the popular rewriting of the history of the Reconstruction South. Panelists at the symposium discussed the historical reception of BOAN in depth, from Peter Davis and Jonathan Wright’s presentations on international receptions, to Andy Uhrich’s discussion of BOAN’s place in independent film collections, to Cara Cadoo’s history of contemporary African American responses, it was made clear over the course of the symposium that BOAN has had been an incendiary film since its first screening. Controversies surrounding the screening of BOAN at the university level have often emerged from the intersection of those two truths. “Why shouldn’t we screen the runaway hit of 1915 that entertained hundreds of thousands?” “Why should we screen a film that has been actively used as recruitment propaganda for the Ku Klux Klan?” These questions were raised and argued on the Indiana University campus in the beginning of the 1979 spring semester when over nine hundred people came to see BOAN at two very different screenings. BOAN has long been prized for its cinematic innovations and its role in the rise of film as popular entertainment. Many fans of classic film have screened BOAN simply as that—an entertaining film from the early days of the movie industry. This sort of screening was what the local chapter of the American Guild of Organists (AGO) had in mind when they sponsored a screening of BOAN at the IU Auditorium with live accompaniment [End Page 246] from famed silent film organist Dennis James, with a two-dollar ticket fee, as a fund-raiser for the chapter. The screening was scheduled for Saturday, February 3, 1979, and was part of an ongoing silent film series. The AGO screening was immediately met by pushback from IU students and faculty. The first complaint dealt with the issue of timing—screening BOAN in the first week of Black History Month, an observance that had only been federally recognized for three years at that point. AGO conceded this point in the face of protests and moved the screening to March 19th. The second complaint was more complex. An argument was made from faculty, students and members of the local community that BOAN should not be shown as a decontextualized entertainment. AGO withdrew their sponsorship, but then amidst new counter-protests, decided to continue, asserting that the film had historic, artistic, and educational merit. What makes this case study in the history of BOAN screenings so interesting, however, is that the original protestors never called for the film’s banning. The major concern dealt entirely with framing the screening. “We don’t advocate complete censorship of the film,” IU student and Black Student Union member Deborah Bailey told the Herald-Times. “What we advocate is a proper time for debate and discussion before and after the film.” Framing concerns came to a head on March 19, 1979, when the IU campus offered two concurrent screenings of BOAN. The AGO screening with live accompaniment moved on in the auditorium, while across the campus in Woodburn Hall, a counter-screening and teach-in was scheduled to begin a half an hour later. Guided by professor of Afro-American Studies Phyllis Klotman (who founded the Black Film Center/Archive at IU two years later) and film studies graduate student, Andetrie Smith, the...

William Faulkner in the Media Ecology ed. by Julian Murphet and Stefan Solomon

Reviewed by: William Faulkner in the Media Ecology ed. by Julian Murphet and Stefan Solomon Patrick E. Horn William Faulkner in the Media Ecology. Edited by Julian Murphet and Stefan Solomon. Southern Literary Studies. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Pp. [xii], 276. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-5948-4.) This important new collection of essays grew out of an Australian research project titled “William Faulkner between Cinema and Literature,” which in turn sponsored an international conference on “Faulkner in the Media Ecology” at the University of New South Wales. It was therefore born global in ways that appeal to this southerner’s soul. However, replacing the title “Cinema and Literature” with the more theoretical (and more vague, hence conference-friendly) “Media Ecology” threatens to obscure the collection’s originating question: how did the rapidly evolving technologies of the early-twentieth-century film industry and its major architects influence and engage William Faulkner’s life and work? Previous scholarly forums and publications have posed similar questions. The University of Mississippi’s 2010 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference focused on “Faulkner and Film,” and selected essays from that conference were published in 2014. A search for scholarly articles on Faulkner and film published since 2010 yielded thousands of results as I sat down to write this review, and that number grows almost daily. And so the Faulkner factory continues to generate ever more light and heat, seeming to contradict the core principles of literary physics. [End Page 709] So, how to define this “media ecology”? According to an excellent introduction by Julian Murphet, the “techno-mediation” that Faulkner lived through and wrote about included traditional media technologies—radio, film, television, photography, the phonograph, the telegraph—as well as American culture’s mediation by other forms of technology—automobile, air, and rail travel as well as news journalism, monetary currency, and even celebrity status (p. 5). These “technologies,” which existed during the writer’s lifetime, were “mechanical and electric, if not yet digital” (p. 9). This answers one major question that the collection raises: whose “media ecology” are we talking about? Here I would caution potential readers that this book does not adequately address twenty-first-century media ecologies. There is little talk of social media or streaming video in these pages, although certain essays reference contemporary photo-editing software and recent television miniseries. Nevertheless, this book does many things well. As a conglomeration of erstwhile conference papers, it manages to hold together, both through the juxtaposition of thematically related essays and through a certain theoretical lingua franca. Theorists such as Sergei Eisenstein, Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, and Theodor W. Adorno make frequent appearances, lending a sense of coherence among essays that otherwise range widely. Many essays offer brief but fascinating (and well-documented) history lessons on the emergence of particular technologies, which will be especially interesting to students and scholars of cultural studies, American studies, and science and literature. Often these histories disclose that new technologies inspired Faulkner’s thinking less through the revelatory modes of perception that they made possible than through their early foibles and shortcomings. Other themes emerge, such as the notion that despite Faulkner’s adversarial relationships to the various technologies discussed herein, his work frequently attempted to co-opt and supersede the new modes of thinking that they made possible. For example, John T. Matthews compellingly argues that The Sound and the Fury (1929) moves from “the most purely cinematic narration” in its first section (that is, Benjy’s) to more traditional forms of literary narration in subsequent sections (Quentin’s and Jason’s), culminating with a return to “the conventions of realist fiction” in section four (p. 30). In sum, Matthews argues, “The Sound and the Fury is the novel that swallowed the movies” (p. 30). This is not a book that most readers will read from cover to cover: there is simply too much high-octane scholarship to take in, even under a rigorous reading regime. It would provide a meaningful backbone to a graduate seminar on Faulkner and film, or literature and media theory. Yet many of these essays can be understood and appreciated on their own. Jay Watson, for example, invites...

The Life of William Apess, Pequot by Philip F. Gura (review)

Reviewed by: The Life of William Apess, Pequot by Philip F. Gura Joshua David Bellin (bio) The Life of William Apess, Pequot philip f. gura Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015 216 pp. Why do we need a new biography of William Apess? When numerous scholars including Barry O’Connell, Bernd Peyer, Robert Allen Warrior, Maureen Konkle, and others have authored substantial biographical studies of the antebellum Pequot activist, I think that’s a fair question to ask. To justify its existence, a new biography of Apess should uncover new materials, forge new links, propose new directions, offer new interpretations, or attract new audiences (or all of the preceding). If not, the argument could be made that it’s redundant. Measured against the foregoing, how does Philip F. Gura’s The Life of William Apess, Pequot fare? Modestly. On the plus side, Gura’s book does suggest several new contexts for Apess’s life; though based largely on established sources—Apess’s own writings, as well as those of O’Connell and other Apess scholars—and structured largely on the oft-rehearsed plotline of Apess’s rise and fall, the book offers compelling hints about the foundations of Apess’s religious and political radicalism, as well as useful background regarding the world in which he lived. Less productively, Gura makes a plea for Apess’s historical significance that is anything but new. Even more problematically, the author claims for his book an audience that, given what his book is, I do not consider realistically within its reach. In his prologue, which delves into the circumstances of Apess’s death, Gura asks how Apess was so quickly forgotten in his own time and has remained so little remembered in ours. Writing that “today [Apess] is known primarily among scholars of Native American studies,” Gura argues that “Apess deserves the same widespread recognition as others in the antebellum period who questioned the sincerity of the nation’s ongoing commitment to democracy, a cohort of reformers that includes Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, champions of women’s rights; Frances Wright and Orestes Brownson, of the dignity of labor; and William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, David Walker, and Frederick Douglass, of African American freedom and equality” (xiii–xiv). Few scholars of American or Native American literature will dispute this assertion of Apess’s importance; indeed, many have made statements like it before. The question of [End Page 212] whether a book such as Gura’s is likely to raise Apess’s public profile is, however, worth asking. Gura submits that Apess’s general anonymity is attributable to the fact that his biographers thus far “have too often aimed [their] works at scholarly communities rather than at the larger public” (xvi). However true this may be, Gura’s book—which is published by a scholarly press, blurbed by scholarly reviewers, and packed with scholarly apparati—strikes me as insufficiently distinct from the studies he criticizes to achieve ends other than theirs. (Indeed, the fact that he contrasts Apess’s obscurity with the supposed renown of figures like Fuller, Wright, and Walker underscores his own faithfulness to a “scholarly community”; for who, other than a statistically tiny pool of historians and literary critics, has ever heard of these people?) If by “widespread recognition” Gura means “recognition among highly educated people,” then his mission has already been accomplished: Apess is at least as well known among those with advanced degrees as is, say, Brownson. If, however, the goal is to make Apess better known to a “larger public” of nonacademics, I would suggest that what we need is not a “straightforward account of Apess’s life and times” (xvi) but a narrative history such as those written by Erik Larson or David McCullough, whose books wear their immense scholarship lightly, appealing to a mass audience not through erudition but through brisk storytelling, vivid character portraits, and (on occasion) deviations from strict documentary accuracy in the interest of spinning a good yarn. Gura’s book offers none of this. It is, instead, a carefully researched and clearly written—a straightforward—scholarly reconstruction of Apess’s life, with few flourishes and much documentation. It covers such...

William J. Seymour and the Origins of Global Pentecostalism: A Biography and Documentary History by Gastón Espinosa (review)

Reviewed by: William J. Seymour and the Origins of Global Pentecostalism: A Biography and Documentary History by Gastón Espinosa Angela M. Nelson WILLIAM J. SEYMOUR AND THE ORIGINS OF GLOBAL PENTECOSTALISM: A Biography and Documentary History. By Gastón Espinosa. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2014. Gastón Espinosa’s William J. Seymour and the Origins of Global Pentecostalism rigorously and thoroughly demonstrates the importance and significance of African American William Seymour’s and that of the Azusa Street Revival’s roles in the origins and development of global Pentecostalism. Espinosa challenges the notion that Seymour and the Azusa Street Revival were “just one among many important leaders and centers of global Pentecostalism. Rather, they were the single most important leader, center, and catalyst (among many) in American (1906–9) and global Pentecostal origins until 1912” (151). Further, he asserts that while “Azusa wasn’t the only center, it was the most important—both literally and symbolically prior to 1909 in the U.S. and prior to 1912 around the world” (151). Participating in a group of scholars writing a new “Pentecostal historiography” (18), a key methodology that Espinosa employs to show the preeminence of Seymour and the Azusa Revival is through ephemeral documentary evidence by Seymour and others between 1906 and 1915. Espinosa relies on this documentation to stage his argument. However, to the advantage of readers, more than half of the book reprints this evidence. Espinosa uses letters, sermons, and teachings written by Seymour or preached as sermons and then stenographically recorded by Clara Lum and others between 1906 and 1909. This evidence includes Seymour’s Doctrines and Discipline Minister’s Manual (1915); first-hand accounts of the Azusa Street Revival and Seymour’s leadership in Seymour’s The Apostolic Faith newspaper (1906–1908). Other sources provide historical overviews and testimonies about Seymour and the Azusa Revival and their influence around the world from histories, autobiographies, testimonies, diaries, reports, newspapers, books, and journals to document Seymour’s theological, social, and racial beliefs and his justification for black-white racial equality and reconciliation. William J. Seymour, the Azusa Revival, and global Pentecostalism are significant to American studies for three reasons. First, the Pentecostal movement is one of the most powerful and fastest growing grassroots religious movements in the world today. The movement is typically broken down into three main groupings: Denominational Pentecostals, Charismatics, and Neo-Charismatics. Pentecostalism continues to expand in the Americas and throughout the world, which might influence American Studies scholars to consider the influence of Pentecostal beliefs on the people and practices they are studying. [End Page 177] Second, as Espinosa shows us through Seymour’s sermons and accounts from the revival, the Azusa revival was a “transgressive social space wherein racial-ethnic minorities, women, the working class, and others could cross some of the deeply inscribed unbiblical racial-ethnic, class, gender, and national borders and boundaries of the day” (101). In a time of legalized segregation and separate but equal practices in America, at Azusa, blacks, whites, and Latinos “laid hands” on each other to be healed and to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit. These same people sat together, and prayed at the altar together. It is also a moment in American history that shows the active participation and involvement of Latino Americans with African Americans and Anglo Americans in the origins and rise of Pentecostalism in the U.S. Third, African-American religious traditions and practices were central to the Azusa Revival and to the missions and denominations that followed it. At Azusa for at least three consecutive years, services were grounded in African-American orality and musicality. These traditions included enthusiastic worship and the singing of Negro spirituals which were influenced by African American theology, social practices, and church hymnody. Being conscious of these practices provides an understanding of the role of African-American religious traditions in influencing American Pentecostalism. Angela M. Nelson Bowling Green State University Copyright © 2016 Mid-America American Studies Association

Between Orientalism and Westernization: Belly Dance as a Transnational American Studies Case

In the last decade, American women’s rising interest in belly dance has drawn the critical attention of American studies scholars. Americanists have traced the transnational development of the dance complex and skilfully critiqued the imperialist politics that are manifest in Western belly dance practice alongside the rhetoric of feminist liberation. With its apparently feminine, mysterious, and exotic qualities, belly dance seems to make a casebook study for Orientalism. Therefore, scholars have tended to view belly dance through this scholarly frame. Yet, if considering only US contexts, utilizing only English-language resources, and only wielding the Western theoretical cannon, even transnational American studies scholarship risks replicating the Orientalist knowledge practices it identifies and condemns in Western women’s belly dance practice and commentary. This essay argues that, despite the conspicuousness of its impact, Orientalism has not been the only civilizational logic operating in the transnational construction of belly dance. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the dance and its meanings were modified also by the East’s perceptions of the West and official attempts to counter the exotic through Westernization. Utilizing Turkish and English sources and participant observation in the United States and Turkey, I compare the contemporary American meanings of the dance complex to its uses in Turkey. I foreground the predominant role played by the male belly, marginalized in American studies of the dance complex, and show how the complex local category of Westernization operates in an uneasy dialectic with Orientalism. This research suggests that the transnational, with its attention to the movement of people, products, and ideas across nation-state borders, must be balanced with the comparative, with attention to cultural formations that do not translate easily across cultures.

A Political Companion to Herman Melville ed. by Jason Frank (review)

Reviewed by: A Political Companion to Herman Melville ed. by Jason Frank Hoang Gia Phan JASON FRANK, ED. A Political Companion to Herman Melville Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013. x + 444 pp. The central premise of A Political Companion to Herman Melville is the remarkable neglect of this canonical author by American political theorists, a neglect that Jason Frank argues “has impoverished our understanding not only of American political thought in the nineteenth century, but of the American political tradition itself” (1–2). Literature and American Studies scholars may find this neglect peculiar, considering the long history of political readings of Moby-Dick since its canonization in what Donald Pease called the Cold War “field-imaginary” of F.O. Matthiessen’s The American Renaissance, as well as the subsequent reinterpretations of Melville’s work by the New Americanists and the fellow-traveling New Historicists. And the October 2011 special issue of Leviathan on “Melville and the Mediterranean” highlighted how far political interpretations of Melville have traveled since the interventions of postcolonial studies. The political scientist Michael Paul Rogin drew upon and did much to advance many of these innovations in cultural history, and his pioneering 1983 study Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville is a looming presence throughout this collection. But just as literary study has become more interdisciplinary in the wake of Marxism and critical theory, political science has become more attuned to the lessons of literary study, as evidenced throughout each of the essays in this comprehensive volume, making A Political Companion a valuable and vital resource for scholars across the disciplines. While the history of political readings of Melville incorporates different perspectives, all have had to offer some account of the relation between Melville and Ishmael’s great God of “democratic dignity,” the “Spirit of Equality.” The contributors to A Political Companion follow suit. As Frank argues in his introduction to the volume and as his own essay contribution demonstrates, Melville throughout his work “interrogated the very space of the political, the stage on which these controversies appeared and became publicly legible and significant” (3). One of the anthology’s most valuable features is that each essay begins with a clearly delineated survey of the opposing strands of criticism on [End Page 100] the texts under consideration. While Melville scholars will find these arguments familiar, this approach usefully introduces undergraduate and graduate students, as well as non-specialists, to the political dimensions of Melville’s work, situating it within a wide range of debates across political theory, philosophy, and history. Like many nineteenth-century writers, Melville foregrounds the relationship between narrator and reader; in first-person or third-person narratives, the second-person address is regularly employed. While owing much to what Fredric Jameson describes as the time of the récit in nineteenth-century novel writing, this narrative convention as deployed by Melville becomes a self-reflexive device, whereby the narrative voice continually reminds the reader of the act of narration and of the narrator’s own complex relationship to the narrative as well as the reader’s mediated relation to it. Melville’s narrators in Typee and Omoo take center stage in the collection’s first essay, Kennan Ferguson’s “Who Eats Whom?,” which examines the “anthropological impulse” (25) of Melville’s first two books. Anthropology has long been implicated in colonial and imperialist projects of the United States, and Ferguson seeks to draw out the vexed relation between such projects and Melville’s “proto-anthropology” (26). Sophia Mihic in “The End Was in the Beginning,” while less inclined than Ferguson to regard Melville as complicit in imperialist cultural rhetorics, likewise attends to narrative voice to connect Melville’s critique of Enlightenment narratives of progress to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Mihic argues that Ellison’s twentieth-century exploration of the artifices of race is similarly preoccupied with the formal and thematic problems of the narrating “I,” the survivor telling his tale in retrospect. She compares their similar political implications by considering the “temporal structures of Melville’s and Ellison’s travelogues as an unhinging of the metaphysical frame of reference and thus of the onto-theology of progress” (49). This...

Power and Paradise in Walt Disney's WorldCher KrauseKnight. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014.

Power and Paradise in Wall Disney's World Cher Krause Knight. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014.In 1976, when Cher Krause Knight was eight years old, she made her first to Disney World, an she found transformative and often repeated. She writes, was never just another family vacation when we went to Disney World, but journey to be savored and one we continue to share (xixii). In Power and Paradise in Disney's World, Knight, an art historian, analyzes Disney World through two disparate lenses: (1) as frequent visitor with deep emotional ties to the park and (2) as an academician drawing on scholarship in American and cultural studies; sociology; visual, material, and popular culture; urban planning and environmental design; cultural anthropology; critical studies; and theology (3). It is tall order, but Knight does fine job of balancing the perspectives, offering new insights into the park and those who visit it, often time and time again. In Power and Paradise in Disney's World, Knight places Disney World in historical perspective, explaining how Disney conceived it and how it was influenced by the concept of the World's Fair, especially the 1964-65 World's Fair in New York City, which he participated in. Disney was never interested in creating an amusement park but rather destination with theme as a frame that orders narrative and shapes experience (5). He did this with Disneyland, which opened in Anaheim, California, in 1955, but he envisioned Disney World as larger, more utopian site with integrated worlds that drew upon the real but made it better, more emotionally intense, happy, and satisfying. Whereas visitors came to Disneyland for day, they would come to Disney World for longer periods of time to refuel, reflect, reconnect, and feel special. Disney World promised cleanliness, order, conformity, and fun. In chapter titled Keeping the Faith: Disney World as Pilgrimage Center, Knight argues that Disney achieved some of his loftiest aspirations, including his explicit aim to provide transcendent experiences (24). Knight compares modern Disney World journey to medieval pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, showing how the two places similarly use space, ritual, and function. Knight writes that Walt and his designers purposefully conceived Disney World as ritualized space for devout followers, who were conditioned beforehand to participate in rites and recognize the symbols enshrined there (30). …

Situating Vietnamese Transnationalism and Diaspora

This review examines Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde’s conceptualization of “transnationalizing Viet Nam.” It pays attention to Valverde’s field research in both the United States and Vietnam, which allowed her to observe how transnational networks of music and the Internet forged collaborations among individuals in both countries, despite severed US—Vietnamese diplomatic ties. It also examines the book’s treatment of the centrality of anti-Communism in Vietnamese diasporic politics and discourse, understanding Valverde’s analysis of anti-Communist hostility and violence as an argument about the limits of ideological inflexibility in Vietnamese American communities. In addition, this review also juxtaposes Valverde’s discussion of anti-Communism with other Southeast Asian American Studies scholars who interrogate the term’s many meanings to foreground the larger project to which Valverde’s project contributes—a critical approach alert to the long histories and multiple migrations that characterize overseas Vietnamese and compels a model of Vietnamese transnationalism and diaspora that is attentive to both pre-and post-Vietnam War contexts

Ever the Twain Shall Meet: Orientalism and American Studies

Ever the Twain Shall Meet: Orientalism and American Studies Jacob S. Dorman (bio) American Arabesque: Arabs, Islam, and the Nineteenth-Century Imaginary. By Jacob Rama Berman. New York: New York University Press, 2012. 288pages. $70.00 (cloth). $24.00 (paper). Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America. By Sohail Daulatzai. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 272pages. $67.50 (cloth). $22.50 (paper). Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature. By Waïl S. Hassan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 288pages. $65.00 (cloth). Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels. By Hsu-Ming Teo. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012. 352pages. $40.20 (cloth). $20.10 (paper). Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary. By Alex Lubin. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 256pages. $29.95 (paper). $24.99 (e-book). In his landmark 1978 work Orientalism, Jerusalem-born Edward Said denied the salience of his subject in the United States, the country he came to call home in 1951, not long after the mass expulsion of Palestinian Arabs during the nakba (catastrophe) of the Israeli War of Independence in 1948. Said wrote that because the United States had no direct empire in Islamic lands, “there was no deeply invested tradition of Orientalism, and consequently in the United States knowledge of the Orient never passed through the refining and reticulating and reconstructing processes, whose beginning was in philological study, that it went through in Europe.”1 But in the decades since the publication of Orientalism, numerous admirers of Said’s work, including [End Page 491] many American studies scholars, have argued that orientalism matters, even in the United States of America. In part this is due to recent geopolitical affairs: US involvement in Muslim lands has expanded since World War II both directly and through its support of Iran, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Pakistan. More recently, the first Gulf War of 1991 and the wars following September 11, 2001, brought US armed forces into direct conflict and cooperation with Islamic countries. Especially in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States has in many ways replicated the British “high” imperialism of the nineteenth century that produced the forms of culture and discursive practices that Said deemed to be authentic orientalism. In this era of direct administration of Muslim lands abroad and intensified surveillance, harassment, and even violence against those perceived to be Muslims at home, American studies scholars have responded with a growing body of work treating American perceptions of the Islamic Orient. Whether these scholars use the freighted term orientalism or prefer a less-charged variant such as Islamicism (Timothy Marr) or arabesque (Jacob Rama Berman), they share the sense that America’s current involvement with Middle East and North Africa and deployment of orientalist representations are much deeper, broader, more influential, and more pervasive than Said imagined back in 1978. American studies scholarship consistently shows Rudyard Kipling’s impermeable line between East and West to be fictive; it disrupts orientalist binaries and challenges whatever might remain of the hoary perception of the United States as a benevolent republic without imperial entanglements. There is also a deeper historical meta-archive composed of US encounters with the Orient or American versions of orientalism that keeps scholars returning to this topic in the last twenty years. First, when US ships lost the protection of European powers after 1783, they immediately became targets of corsairs from the Barbary Coast. North Africans enslaved hundreds of Americans taken captive from these ships, and these captives’ narratives circulated during the early republic, often as part of ransom campaigns. These popular accounts of enslavement written by white Americans (and a solitary African American) gave readers the vertiginous experience of a racial role reversal in slavery and thereby fueled abolitionist campaigns at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Of even greater import was the popularity of Richard Francis Burton’s English translations of One Thousand and One Nights, published beginning in 1885, which led to a fad for orientalism in all modes of expressive culture in the subsequent century plus, from the fiction of Washington Irving to...

Ecological Chains of Unfreedom: Contours of Black Sovereignty in the Atlantic World

Black sovereignty in the Atlantic world pivots, as in the case of Haiti, from a haunting apparition to a haunting recognition, never quite forming a tangible, and legal, sovereignty unto itself. Haiti's tangled and complicated geopolitical positioning within the Atlantic world gives this spectral state of being meaning. Sovereignty, or, as I will suggest, the processes of recognizing sovereignty and the material shape of its appearance, imbues Haiti's sovereign claims with a specific racialized threshold. Reading along Haiti's racio-national edge also illuminates the tenuous position on the international stage of Liberia and Abyssinia – two nations, along with Haiti, that represented the only nation-states in the Atlantic world by the end of the nineteenth century with a majority black population and independence. Although a small representative group, these sites deserve far more scrutiny within the fields of race and sovereignty studies by legal scholars and scholars of transnational American studies, especially because of the ways the nations battled for recognition and respect amongst other nation-states who may have attached derogatory notions of humanity onto the political work and rights of these self-avowed black nations. Haiti is an important example of this phenomenon.

An Army of Debt

Over the past decade, the US Department of Defense has become increasingly concerned with how the financial insecurity of military families compromises the overall security of the nation. Through an analysis of the policy reports focusing on predatory lending and military personnel and the initiatives designed to improve the financial capabilities of servicemembers and their families, this article situates the everyday domestic lives of indebted military personnel with respect to the racialized, gendered and militarized logics of global finance capital. Specifically, I argue that the perceived crisis in ‘financial readiness’ is endemic to the US security state and its efforts to protect and produce financialized markets at home and abroad. Inspired by the growing body of Cultural Studies and American Studies scholarship on the relationship between race, empire and the financialization of capitalism, this article unpacks the ways in which state practices of war-making fuel and are fueled by the chronic indebtedness of communities of colour and working-class communities. I open with a discussion of how the Pentagon's coercive enlistment practices burden economically insecure bodies with the work of securing the nation and, in doing so, create concentrated populations of young people who, with a regular pay cheque yet no credit history, are particularly vulnerable to the financial structures they ‘volunteered’ to defend. I then conclude with an examination of the Pentagon's family-focused financial readiness programmes that school servicemembers in how to invest for their futures and that call specifically upon military wives to do the labour of mobilizing household financial plans in the service of US imperial interests. By focusing on how military families are imagined to manage and mismanage their debt, this article offers insight into how the militarization of citizenship coincides with the financialization of family life in the United States today.

Myth of the western: new perspectives on Hollywood's frontier narrative

What is the nature of the relationship between the Hollywood Western and American frontier mythology? How have Western films helped develop cultural and historical perceptions, attitudes and beliefs towards the frontier? Is there still a place for the genre in light of revisionist histories of the American West? Myth of the Western re-invigorates the debate surrounding the relationship between the Western and frontier mythology, arguing for the importance of the genre's socio-cultural, historical and political dimensions. Taking a number of critical-theoretical and philosophical approaches, Matthew Carter applies them to prominent forms of frontier historiography. He also considers the historiographic element of the Western by exploring the different ways in which the genre has responded to the issues raised by the frontier. Carter skilfully argues that the genre has - and continues to reveal - the complexities and contradictions at the heart of US society. With its clear analyses of and intellectual challenges to the film scholarship that has developed around the Western over a 65-year period, this book adds new depth to our understanding of specific film texts and of the genre as a whole - a welcome resource for students and scholars in both Film Studies and American Studies.

Son of the Forest: William Apess and the Fight for Indigenous Rights

Son of the Forest:William Apess and the Fight for Indigenous Rights Philip F. Gura (bio) from The Life of William Apess, Pequot On April 10, 1839, Dr. J. S. Hurd, a New York City medical examiner, performed an autopsy on a man at William Garlick’s boardinghouse in lower Manhattan. Garlick’s boardinghouse stood at 31 Washington Street, two streets east of the Hudson River and bordered by Battery Place and Moore Street. Washington Street was one of several thoroughfares in a neighborhood that was home to crowds of low-paid workers, a population mirrored across the island along the East River, where eighteenth-century Dutch and English inhabitants had built sturdy homes adjacent to flourishing slips, piers, and warehouses. As commerce increased, though, the “East Ward” had become overcrowded. Wealthier families moved uptown, as far north as Fourteenth Street along Broadway, into neighborhoods delineated by the “grid” plan that the city’s Streets Commission had instituted for more orderly development. Their previous homes then became boardinghouses for an ever-shifting population of clerks, craft apprentices, cart men, dockworkers, sailors, and various day laborers. The deceased had lived at this address since January with his second wife, Elizabeth, to whom he had been married for at least two years. Within days of the inquest into his death, scores of newspapers in New York, New England, and down the East Coast were reporting his demise. But bespeaking the man’s obscurity, what publicity there was surrounding his death initially lay more in its circumstances, signaled by a notice in the Philadelphia North American, than in his identity. “lobelia again,” the column read, for the inquest had uncovered that a “botanic physician,” Dr. Asher Atkinson, had administered lobelia, a homeopathic drug, to his patient shortly before his death. Many people, particularly members of the established medical profession, regarded botanic medicine as quackery, and the headline implied that Atkinson’s ministrations had evidently contributed to another patient’s demise. In such cities as New York and Philadelphia, where tensions between botanic and allopathic physicians were especially great, many readers viewed this individual’s death as but another example of the failure of unregulated medical practice. The inquest, however, concluded that he had died of “apoplexy,” a diagnosis commonly used to describe something akin to a stroke and whose symptoms were congruent with what Dr. Hurd had found in his examination. The inquest [End Page 72] absolved Dr. Atkinson of any blame and dampened further attempts to place the lack of effectiveness of botanic medicine at the center of the story of this individual’s death. Instead, reports shifted to who he was. A notice in the Philadelphia North American described him as “a Narragansett Indian … otherwise known about the country as Apes the Missionary Preacher.” “The deceased in his lifetime was an author,” the Albany Evening Journal noted, who “wrote the Life of ‘King Philip,’ several sermons, &c, which he sold for his own interest.” The same paper mentioned, albeit erroneously, that the man’s wife was a “good looking white woman,” a fact that, though titillating to some genteel readers, would not have made the couple unusual in lower Manhattan neighborhoods. Five Points, for example, was notoriously multiracial. No newspaper, however, mentioned that six years earlier the deceased had begun a meteoric rise as a spokesperson for Native American rights and liberties. The deceased was forty-one-year-old William Apess. Two years earlier, he had been one of the country’s most important Native American intellectuals, having published more than any other indigenous writer before the twentieth century and attained fame and notoriety for championing his people’s tribal rights. In 1829, he had issued his autobiography, the first Native American to do so. He had led the successful challenge of the Mashpee Indians against the state of Massachusetts, through which the Mashpees sought to restore some measure of self-governance. Apess subsequently had embarked on a lecture career in New York, speaking on the history and culture of Native Americans. Despite Apess’s extraordinary significance, today he is known almost exclusively among scholars of Native American studies, with excerpts from his writings taught...

From the Editor

From the Editor Mari Yoshihara, Editor As many readers already know, the editorial office of American Quarterly has officially moved from the University of Southern California to the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa as of July 1, 2014. However, because of the editorial pipeline in the transition process, the review and selection of the articles in this issue were completed by the University of Southern California editorial team led by Sarah Banet-Weiser. The production phase of the issue was handled jointly by Nic John Ramos, the previous managing editor at the University of Southern California, and Stacy Nojima, the new managing editor at the University of Hawai’i. Because of the transition, this issue does not have a traditional Editor’s Note. The March 2015 issue, which will be the first issue that the University of Hawai’i team is primarily responsible for editing, will carry an Editor’s Note outlining the new editorial team’s visions for American Quarterly and describing the editorial practice we have put in place to realize those visions. In the meantime, we enthusiastically welcome submissions of articles on all topics in the field by scholars from all backgrounds and affiliations. In lieu of an Editor’s Note, I would like to congratulate the University of Southern California editorial team for the wonderful job it has done in representing the best scholarship and moving the field of American studies in new directions in the past decade. With a humble recognition that I have very large shoes to fill, I would like to express my admiration for my predecessors in California, Marita Sturken, Curtis Marez, and Sarah Banet-Weiser, for their editorial vision and leadership, and thank the Board of Managing Editors and the editorial staff for their commitment to the selection and distribution of rigorous, border-crossing scholarship in American studies. [End Page v] Copyright © 2014 The American Studies Association

Civil Disobedience: An American Tradition. By Lewis Perry. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013. xv + 407. $35.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Civil Disobedience: An American Tradition . By Lewis Perry . New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press , 2013. xv + 407. $35.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesThis impressively comprehensive survey traces the practice and theory of disobedience the United States from the eighteenth century to the present. Violating the law in the name of higher morality is, according to Perry, a distinctive American that flourished every age and achieved special prominence the decades before the Civil War and the 1960s (1). Perry moves deftly from abolition to Occupy, from campaigns against Indian removal to Operation Rescue, touching en route on women's rights, temperance, pacifism, labor organizing, and other impulses for social transformation.Several thematic arguments give shape to Perry's chronological narrative. The first is encapsulated the subtitle: gently resisting the transnational tendencies of other American studies scholars, Perry insists on the American provenance of disobedience. This approach to social change appeals to democracy-loving Americans because it is civil as well as disobedient. It allows the activist to affirm the general validity of democratic institutions even while violating specific unjust laws. Perry's stress on the Americanness of disobedience helps him underscore its character as tradition that is continuous over time. Too much emphasis on the Gandhian character of rights, for example, would obscure its homegrown reliance on abolitionist precedents. On the other hand, Perry's approach obscures the profoundly cosmopolitan sensibilities of most disobedients. In the abolitionist era, Henry David Thoreau read the sacred texts of India, William Lloyd Garrison declared that our country is the world, and William Wells Brown began resisting Jim Crow segregation after experiencing integration England. Their twentieth-century successors filled their homes with icons of Mohandas Gandhi, Oscar Romero, and Nelson Mandela. Few imagined that the United States was the only arena for their activism.A second guiding theme is the religious origin of disobedience. Though many activists claim the Boston Tea Party as inspiration, Perry suggests that it was less influential than the refusal of eighteenth-century Baptists to pay church taxes. Shortly before abolitionists began using disobedience on large scale, group of protestant missionaries to the Cherokee accepted imprisonment rather than comply with the Jacksonian policy of Indian removal. I found these stories to be the most exciting part of the book, but they raise questions. If eighteenth-century Baptists New England are part of the story, why not sixteenth-century Anabaptists Switzerland? And if the Baptist campaign against state religion launched the tradition, why were Baptists proportionately under-represented subsequent disobedience campaigns, while establishmentarian Congregationalists and Unitarians were over-represented? (The even more over-represented Quakers might offer clue, since they had both an anti-establishmentarian theology and heritage of quasi-establishment Pennsylvania.)Perry's training as an intellectual historian informs third theme. He is fascinated with the theory underlying disobedience, and repeatedly skewers activists for seeking to circumscribe it within narrow definition. Civil disobedience, he insists, has never been restricted to pacifists. …

Epistemologies of State, Epistemologies of Text. A review of Timothy Melley, The Covert Sphere : Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State

Epistemologies of State, Epistemologies of Text. A review of Timothy Melley, The Covert Sphere:Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State Aaron Colton (bio) Melley, Timothy. The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2012. Richard J. Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1952) provides the classic framework for any scholarly discussion of conspiracy and paranoia in the United States. In his essay, Hofstadter reminds us of the self-assured heroism implicit in the conspiratorial mindset—how the paranoiac understands conspiracy solely in “apocalyptic terms,” and how he “traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds … manning the barricades of civilization” (29-30). Scholarship on conspiracy is thus an exceptionally tone-sensitive genre. Write too modestly and the argument will fail to catch; write too strongly and you risk enacting the same paranoia you seek to gauge. Restraint can make for unconvincing prose, but even worse, discernibly paranoid criticism can end up, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has remarked, “blotting out any sense of the possibility of alternative ways of understanding or things to understand” (131). In The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State (2012), Timothy Melley manages these demands deftly. The conspiracy theorist, as Hofstadter notes, aims toward the reduction of global systems into sinister, coherent plots managed by a handful of individuals “not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history” (32). Melley, however, is more interested in explicating discursive processes than in pinning major cultural and political developments on a few persons or sources; he defines “the covert sphere” as “a cultural imaginary shaped by both institutional secrecy and public fascination with the secret work of the state” (5). Melley contends that the US government’s efforts to silence or censor journalism after WWII implicitly authorized only select, speculative media—postmodern fiction, in large part—to probe the covert action of the state. This, however, would begin a vicious feedback loop. While writers such as Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, Robert Coover, Tim O’Brien, Joan Didion, and E.L Doctorow would deploy “postmodern epistemological skepticism” to critique state secrecy (10), so too would the Cold War US state erect comparable “epistemological barriers to knowing the work of the state” (105). By investing his prose in this intricate, two-way relationship between state and text—rather than proposing a model of cultural and social development engineered only from highest government offices—Melley effectively evades the self-aggrandizing, me-against-the-world stereotype of thinkers involved in conspiracy theories. Claims that could easily come off as conspiratorial—for instance, that “geopolitical melodramas” such as Fox’s 24 underlie the twenty-first century discourse on national security (219)—are rendered reasonable and compelling. Readers hardly suspect the author as paranoid himself. Melley’s text seamlessly weaves together decades of American studies scholarship on the Cold War and its sociological and aesthetic repercussions. In the context of current scholarship, one might think of The Covert Sphere as a companion to and even an expansion of Daniel Grausam’s On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War (2011), which investigates what exactly the fictional narrative can and cannot articulate in the context of mutually assured destruction. Comparatively, one can think of The Covert Sphere as an institutional parallel to Tobin Siebers’s Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism (1993), an analysis of the ways that theorists (as opposed to novelists) offer a cult of personality and power over knowledge in response to a world that could, at any given moment, erupt into nuclear warfare. Melley’s work follows another acclaimed historicization of fiction in the Cold War era, Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009), which chronicles the advent of American MFA programs in the mid- to late-twentieth century. While McGurl speaks mainly to the ways in which the Cold War allowed universities to both philosophically and financially seize on “the linked values of fictionality and creativity” and thus mark their investment in “vivacious American individualism” (McGurl 265), Melley sketches the overarching, epistemological structures that govern such transactions. Indeed, one of the most admirable features of Melley’s...

The Explanatory Critic:

The Explanatory Critic:

The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend by Glenn Frankel (review)

Reviewed by: The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend by Glenn Frankel Edwin Whitewolf The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend. By Glenn Frankel. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. 416 pages, $28.00. Within the introduction to The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, Glenn Frankel explains that what he finds most striking about the film is John Ford’s “ability to weave myth and truth into a seamless fabric” (8). This book is Frankel’s attempt at deconstructing the myths behind the film: the kidnapping of a white settler girl named Cynthia Ann Parker, her assimilation into Comanche society, and her “rescue” decades later by the Texas Rangers. Frankel elucidates how this history has been written, rewritten, and reinterpreted by a number of people and groups, including Ford in his 1956 film The Searchers. The first two sections of the book compose the most compelling half of the narrative when Frankel deals specifically with the mythology of how Parker’s story has been passed down and translated throughout the years by her white and Comanche descendants, as well as by US western writer Alan LeMay and filmmaker John Ford. Frankel deftly deconstructs a number of interwoven mythologies involving white settlers, Comanches, Texas Rangers, western fiction writers, directors, producers, Navajo actors, movie stars, and he convincingly illustrates how the story of one woman became a part of the mainstream US consciousness. Also admirable is how Frankel privileges histories written by women, representing much of the mythology surrounding Parker as the product of male creation: “Each of these male authors created and buffed the macho frontier legend using whatever facts fit their vision and discarding those that were less convenient. But occasionally, someone came along who gathered a more modest, fact-based account” (151). Thus, he privileges the voices of Rachel Plummer, Marion Ross, Susan Parker St. John, and Araminta Taulman in telling this history. It is disappointing, however, that Frankel settles upon a particular representation of the Comanches. He elides the history and cycles of violence that had shaped Comanche/Euroamerican relations for hundreds of years previous to the kidnapping of Parker and portrays the Comanche people largely as marauding, baby-killing rapists bent on the destruction of white bodies. While he comments about the regrettable way US citizens and the US government treated Native Americans in general, he claims, “The modern image of Indians—nurtured by the Native American rights movement, revisionist historians, and the film Dances with Wolves—has been one of profoundly spiritual and environmentally friendly genocide victims seeking harmony with the land and humankind. But the Comanches were nobody’s victims and no one’s friends. They were magnificent, brutal, and relentless” (32). While only a revisionist historian could portray the Comanches as a peaceable or docile people, Frankel portrays them using the language one [End Page 490] would use in describing the great white shark in Jaws (1975). He largely ignores that the Comanches fought back against the Euroamerican encroachment that had dispossessed them from their land and spread disease and famine among them for generations. Additionally, many Native American studies scholars and many people within the Native American rights movement, or even those familiar with it, would take issue with Frankel’s suggestion that they have nurtured an image of Native Americans as anything other than human beings who are not simply figures of a brutal or a romanticized past. Finally, is Frankel proposing that Native Americans were not victims of genocide? Is genocide a word that can only be applied to those victims that can be deemed friendly or incapable of resisting? In the introduction, Frankel explains what he found most fascinating about The Searchers when he watched it in his youth: “What entranced me most were the Comanches. … Ford’s portrait of them is mostly one-dimensional: Indians in The Searchers are for the most part murderers and rapists” (7). It is, therefore, ironic that Frankel largely portrays the Comanches in the same fashion. This lack of historical contextualization is especially frustrating because, otherwise, the book is truly captivating. Frankel’s illustration of how a specific history gave birth to a number of mythologies and how those mythologies in turn...

American Studies and the University of Debt

Response to 2013 American Studies Association Presidential Address by Curtis Marez.In his presidential address, Curtis Marez articulates an ambitious double project for himself and for the field: to “center collective dissent to student debt in American studies” and “to outline an American studies version of critical university studies.” As the address unfolds, he successfully demonstrates that many of the richest areas of scholarship in American studies in recent decades — such as explorations of the constitution of racial, gendered, and class subjectivities, identities, and hierarchies; and the transnational processes and relations in which the United States is situated — could and/or should, if they have not done so already, engage debt, and in particular “student debt,” “university debt,” “the university of debt,” as a constitutive force such that “the contemporary regime of university debt constitutes a form of racialized and gendered settler colonial capitalism.”