American Studies Scholars Research Articles

Introduction: Transnational American Studies as Transdisciplinary Collaboration

Author(s): Morgan, Nina; Kim, Sabine | Abstract: Understanding that the transnational frame of twenty-first century scholarship in Transnational American Studies leaves behind the “national” origin of reference as an analytical tool and thus...

Thing

Thing Sonia Hazard KEY WORDS material culture, evangelicalism, thing theory, American Tract Society, new materialism, posthumanism, material texts, history of reading, reception, bookbinding, reform, book history, daguerrotype photography, Jane Bennett, David Brainerd In his 2001 article “Thing Theory,” the literary critic Bill Brown posed a distinction between objects and things. Objects are prisoners in our familiar dialectic between subjects and objects. As the subordinate term, objects are pliant to the subject’s concerns and intentions. Subjects objectify objects. Things, according to Brown, are another matter. Unlike an object, a thing may surprise us, refusing to follow the subject’s script as it pursues its own agenda. Brown’s definition of things prefigured a theoretical development in the humanities today, one that poses a set of provocations for scholars of early American material texts. These ideas are variant and wide-ranging but, for our purposes, may be summarized as forms of “new materialism.” New materialists share with Brown the premise that material things wield an agency, of a kind, that shapes human practice and culture. This point is intuitive at some level. The present sequence of words, for instance, is altered by the substance of caffeine that my body metabolizes as it writes. Meanwhile, my eyes are lured toward the glowing screen, which affords forms of thinking and writing different from the imposed linearity of the typewriter. This is not to claim that all things have the same type or level of agency. My computer does not have intentions and it cannot pour my coffee. But if we can accept that coffee and screens can do certain things, however subtle, to scholars today, might we also ask: What did books do to early Americans?1 [End Page 792] The question may feel quite retro for scholars of material texts. Decades ago, Elizabeth Eisenstein touched off a debate regarding material agency with the publication of The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979). Eisenstein argued that print technology triggered cultural transformations that defined modernity, but her detractors countered that print’s material arrival must be contextualized within preexisting cultures. On their view, cultural meanings mattered more than their post hoc physical expressions in words—whether those words were printed, manuscript, or spoken. In the wake of the larger cultural turn across the disciplines in the 1980s and 1990s, consensus turned against Eisenstein, and “material determinism” and “material agency” accrued pejorative connotations.2 For altogether different reasons, the use of agency as a term applied to material things may also sit uneasily with scholars of early American studies. With his article “On Agency” (2003), Walter Johnson set in motion early American studies’ version of the agency debate. Johnson upbraided historians, especially white historians, as overeager to attribute “agency” to enslaved people. Among his critiques, Johnson argued that championing their agency risked minimizing the oppressions endured under the objective conditions of the slave system. In the hands of some historians, moreover, attempts to recover agency had turned up evidence so thin as to be meaningless, making agency equivalent to something like “humanity.” Given withering critiques of the concept, scholars of early America might wonder, eyebrows raised: If we should no longer use this category to describe people, then why should we apply it to mere things?3 [End Page 793] My purpose is not to induce déjà vu by drudging up timeworn debates, but to draw on new materialist philosophy to pose the problem of material agency differently from how it has been articulated, either in material texts or in early American studies. The challenge of new materialism is to think outside the logic that assumes that objects (and objective conditions) and subjects can be conceptually separated, and that agency may reside with only one or the other: in our terms, either with printing technologies (for Eisenstein) and institutions and structures (as Johnson might put it) or with human intentions and meanings. New materialists urge scholars to approach agency as something distributed across assemblages of subjects and objects, human and nonhuman actors. On this view, it is not I who writes. It’s a group effort: my brain and my fingers and the computer and the chair and the coffee write. Things...

Dirty Harry's America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash by Joe Street

Reviewed by: Dirty Harry's America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash by Joe Street James I. Deutsch DIRTY HARRY'S AMERICA: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash. By Joe Street. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2016. On August 30, 2012, Clint Eastwood addressed a wildly enthusiastic crowd on the final day of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. Eastwood's bizarre conversation with an empty chair representing Barack Obama attracted the most media attention in the days that followed. But equally intriguing were the speech's opening and closing remarks, which repeated two phrases famously used by Eastwood's best-known cinematic character, "Dirty Harry" Callahan. Eastwood's first words—after thanking the crowd—were "I know what you are thinking," which references his taunting a bank robber who isn't sure if Callahan fired five or six shots with his .44 Magnum handgun in Dirty Harry (1971). Eastwood's ended his speech in Tampa with "Go ahead," which then provoked the convention delegates to roar back in unison, "Make my day!," thereby referencing the catch-phrase used by Callahan in Sudden Impact (1983), the third of four sequels that followed the original film. Eastwood's performance in Tampa not only "reminded listeners of the centrality of Harry Callahan in Eastwood's persona," but also "indicated that Callahan was firmly in the conservative camp, partnering Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan in their quest for the White House" (141), argues Joe Street, a senior lecturer in history at Northumbria University. Although this "conservative camp" may be more multifaceted than Street describes, his book is a well-written and thoroughly engaging analysis of Dirty Harry's origins, cultural history, and legacy. Street incisively explores the key themes expressed in Dirty Harry and its four sequels, concluding that "Callahan represents American strength, honor, chivalry, and righteousness while also revealing its bloodlust, lack of respect for the rule book, and fondness for guns" (201). Dirty Harry's America begins with an assessment of Eastwood's career in the 1950s and 60s, including his earlier collaborations with Don Siegel, who directed Eastwood in three films prior to Dirty Harry. Chapter 2 explores the wider political, cultural, and social context of the 1971 film, particularly how it corresponds to the evolution of cinematic private detectives and police officers who go "rogue in single-minded pursuit" [End Page 109] of their antagonists (41), as well as the "so-called urban crisis [that] manifested all of the fears of American liberals in the 1960s" (43). Chapter 3 considers the significance of San Francisco as the setting for the Dirty Harry films, particularly the city's unusual combination of liberalism and cultural tolerance together with its roots in the Old West and the popularity of both Ronald Reagan (then serving as California's governor) and Richard Nixon (a native Californian then serving as U.S. president). The book's final three chapters examine the legacies of Dirty Harry—first in the themes that unite the original with its sequels, and then in the ways in which the films continue to resonate in American popular and political culture. Here Street explores Eastwood's service as mayor of Carmel, his roles in more recent films such as Gran Torino (2008), and the references to Callahan in vigilante films such as Death Wish (1974), television series such as Sledge Hammer (1986–1988), video games such as Dirty Harry (1980), and graphic novels such as Sin City: That Yellow Bastard (1996). In short, Dirty Harry's America is an excellent example of American Studies scholarship, which analyzes this cultural phenomenon from multiple perspectives, including class, gender, geography, law, politics, popular culture, race, and sexuality. James I. Deutsch Smithsonian Institution Copyright © 2018 Mid-America American Studies Association

Queer Indie Video Games as an Alternative Digital Humanities: Counterstrategies for Cultural Critique through Interactive Media

Since 2012 the American video games landscape has seen a rising tide of experimental, independently developed queer digital games. In this essay, I argue that the development of these games can be considered a form of digital humanities practice, and that the game makers who produce them can be seen as performing their own genre of American studies scholarship. Together, these games and their creators offer an alternative vision of the digital humanities, modeling counterstrategies for critical engagement through queer, digital praxis and pushing current conversations around diversity, representation, and social justice in DH in important new directions. To illustrate how these games model an alternative DH, this essay draws from interviews conducted with the queer indie game designers Aevee Bee, Andi McClure, and Nicky Case. Building from work by scholars like Tara McPherson, Kara Keeling, and Moya Bailey, this essay contributes to a larger push from scholars of sexuality, gender, and race within DH to interrogate the methods and meanings of the digital humanities and to continue to expand the field's engagement with perspectives that have too long been pushed to the margins.

“The Will to Adorn”: Nick Cave’s Soundsuits and the Queer Reframing of Black Masculinity

ABSTRACTThis article analyses Nick Cave’s “soundsuits”—striking for their elaborately ornamented forms and vibrant colours—as queer reframings of black masculinity. Drawing on scholarship in African American studies that examines the production of black masculinity in response to racial violence, the article explores how Cave’s soundsuits (produced from 1991 to 2011) can be understood in relationship to the beating of Rodney King that took place in Los Angeles in 1991. This exploration entails tracing how Cave’s artwork alludes to the history of the black dandy, considered by many scholars to be an emblematic figure of the black sartorial imagination. By queering and elaborating on the adornment associated with the black dandy, Cave defies the racist and sexist subtexts of long-standing arguments against display and ornamentation to create a defence against the systemic violence inflicted upon the black male body in the US.

In the Streets of San Francisco

The presidency of Donald Trump has occasioned critical repercussions within the field of American Studies around the world. This piece is a response from Germany: a country marked by the historical experiences of fascism and a socialist surveillance state, but a country that, in spite of the liberal pluralistic consensus that grew out of these historical traumata, now has to face a similar development as other Western countries: the rise of new forms of nationalist parochialism, racism coupled with white patriarchal nostalgia and a militant anti-humanism. The rise of a new right, the piece argues, must be regarded as the manifestation of deep insecurities about individual and collective identities which are increasingly defined not on the basis of achievement but on the basis of inheritance. Remembering an instance of ‘hospitality toward a stranger’ in 1979 California, the essay evokes the spirit of cosmopolitanism which, though currently under fierce attack, continues to thrive in the United States, thanks to the commitment of local civil actors, and which needs to be defended by comparatively minded American Studies scholars.

Cuba, the United States, and Cultures of the Transnational Left, 1930–1975

Scholars in American studies now routinely utilize the apparatus of history, including intensive archival research in topics once the province of political and diplomatic historians. True to their interdisciplinary mandate, however, they operate more like literary scholars than historians. The resulting studies do not construct narratives of change over time, interrogating causation and contingency; rather, they practice history by allusion, ranging and choosing from whatever mix of subjects, events, or trends seem useful. The paradigm for such monographs is Michael Denning's provocative, deservedly influential The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (1996), which offers a powerful narrative of the 1930s Popular Front. Unfortunately, some more recent works simply frustrate in their refusal to take history seriously as history, rather than a vehicle from which to elaborate hypotheses about culture. Cuba, the United States, and the Cultures of the Transnational Left is a prime example of the new American cultural studies. It begins with a clear periodization and a historical subject: “US-Cuban political and cultural exchange around the Cuban revolutions of 1933 and 1959” (p. 3). The book's stated goal, however, is quite different. It seeks to examine the “transition from modernism to postmodernism, a critical juncture in late capitalism” using “diverse cultural studies methods” as a way “to rethink poetry and policy decisions in the same breath and to probe a range of representational sites mined from transnational tributaries” (pp. 3, 11, 13). In practice this leads to a pastiche mixing up cultural diplomacy, transnational politics of all sorts, and literary analysis. Actors include the Foreign Policy Association, the communist movements in both countries, the State Department's Division of Cultural Relations, the Black Panthers and other African American revolutionaries, the poets Nicolas Guillen and Langston Hughes, and, as a parting note, the Haitian rapper Wyclef Jean's 1997 mix-up of “Guantanamera.”

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note Mari Yoshihara This issue of American Quarterly goes into production in the wake of the 2016 election, and by the time this issue goes to print, Donald Trump will be serving as president of the United States. Even as American studies scholars have long dedicated ourselves to understanding white supremacy, patriarchy, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and neoliberalism, the election results have been a tremendous shock. The values, policies, and behavior represented by Trump, his supporters, and those he is choosing as his staff are deeply in opposition to the fundamental principles of the ASA community. The election results challenge us to seriously reflect on what it means to do American studies and renew our commitments as scholars, teachers, and activists in this world. What the United States and the world are about to face under the Trump administration—many aspects of which will try to undermine the gains of decades of social activism, others of which will reinforce the injustices and inequalities structured into American society long before this election—all the more underscores the critical importance of rigorous intersectional analysis of American history and society and engaged pedagogy and activism. It is, then, perhaps fitting that we open this issue with an essay on the question of entrance to the White House. Kate Masur examines African Americans’ demands for recognition at White House social functions and whites’ varied reactions during the Lincoln administration. Other essays in this issue also address race, biopower, and regulation of body and space in different political contexts. Juliet Nebolon focuses on public health programs in World War II Hawai‘i to analyze the interconnected regimes of US settler colonialism and militarization, illustrating how wartime racial liberalism compelled all people in Hawai‘i to cultivate health, which then led to the extraction of biomedical resources in the name of military security. John Bloom looks at mandatory bicycle regulation and bicycle stakeouts in Washington, DC, in 1963–2009 as a mechanism for policing of racial boundaries in public spaces, which fore-shadowed the racialized law and order policies practiced across the nation. Joseph Darda and Theresa Geller both analyze the cultural narratives about the state and war in film and television. Darda chronicles how the George H. W. Bush administration revised the cultural narrative of the Vietnam War by militarizing the humanitarian ethic of the antiwar movement in the Persian Gulf and how the militarization of humanitarian affect contained liberal anti-war [End Page v] discourse. Geller’s study of The X-Files uses Fredric Jameson’s methods to illustrate the show’s allegorization of the dialectical relationship between the governmental conspiracy and the effects of its unchecked power on marginalized communities. This issue carries four book reviews on new scholarship in diverse topics. In her review of three books that reassess the analytic of intersectionality, Jennifer C. Nash problematizes the impulse toward a “correct” reading and historicization of intersectionality and calls for a sustained interrogation of the ways in which “black woman” haunts the unconscious of the fields. This review provides a useful context for Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s discussion of three works on black sexuality, erotic labor, and pornography. Patrick Wilz reviews four books on discourses of opposition in the twentieth century. John Worsencroft’s review examines four works on militarized state, community, and citizenship. In an event review, Kristin Moriah discusses the paradox of the seeming ascendance of ethnic diversity on the popular stage in her review of the 2016 Broadway musical Shuffle Along, or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed. [End Page vi] Copyright © 2017 The American Studies Association

Presidential Libraries as Performance: Curating American Character from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush by Jodi Kanter

Reviewed by: Presidential Libraries as Performance: Curating American Character from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush by Jodi Kanter Jennifer Carpenter Presidential Libraries as Performance: Curating American Character from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush. By Jodi Kanter. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. Pp. 179. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.) Visitors to presidential libraries expect to discover a president’s early influences, journey with him on his rise to power, evaluate his domestic and international policies, relive his political struggles, and delight in touching personal stories about life in the White House. What they perhaps do not expect to encounter is a lens through which to understand how to be an American. Presidential Libraries as Performance by Jodi Kanter demonstrates the myriad ways these museums define and influence cultural identity and suggests how they can better mirror the nuanced realities of the Oval Office, its place in a period’s unique social and political climate, and the complexities of American character. Presidential libraries, whose records are administered by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), but whose exhibits are often managed in partnership with private foundations, are—and should be—more than static chronicles of the commander in chief’s time in office. Kanter evaluates narrative themes and exhibition techniques employed at these sites and considers how they affect visitors’ understanding of both the library’s namesake and their own role in public life. The approach is wholesale, moving beyond the exhibit space to consider how the entire museum site and its architecture convey certain messages. Case studies and comparisons reveal critical tensions. Presidential family in-fighting, funding, and issues of artifact selection and curation reveal a constant negotiation that results in different institutional arrangements and types of exhibits. There is no off-the-shelf plan for presidential libraries. Kanter keeps readers’ interest and challenges them to become more observant and critical visitors by helping them understand the stories behind the libraries’ creations, their strengths and shortcomings, and the differences among them. Kanter debunks the myth of presidential individual agency and calls for [End Page 118] forthcoming and inclusive exhibits that better resonate with visitors and honor their own political voices. Some of this work has already begun. Several sites have redone displays to include omitted and controversial topics (for example, the Watergate scandal exhibit at the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California, opened in 2011) and to invite meaningful visitor participation (such as the 9/11 gallery at the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas, Texas). Kanter urges museum professionals to continue this work by offering suggestions ranging from the practical to the creative, but as an interdisciplinary analysis, her book will appeal to scholars of modern presidential history, politics, cultural identity, and American Studies. Presidential Libraries as Performance includes descriptive vignettes and assessments of Texas’s own Lyndon B. Johnson, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush Libraries’ exhibits. One museum feature excluded from the study is the gift shop, which, though beyond the scope of Kanter’s focus, could provide an interesting look at performance (presidential and generally American) vis-à-vis consumerism. Still, in the age of 24/7-news-cycle-and-Twitter-fueled political theater, the suggestion that the presidential library could recast itself as a place for open, critically honest discourse instead of as a final word on executive legacy, as many presidents may hope, is a refreshing thought. Jennifer Carpenter Texas Parks and Wildlife Department Copyright © 2017 The Texas State Historical Association

Legible Natives: Making Native Women Visible in the Literary Arts

Legible Natives:Making Native Women Visible in the Literary Arts Penelope M. Kelsey This essay holds integral the assumption that any analysis of Native American women's literary traditions must consider intersections of the political and the literary, as before and since contact, stories have been the primary means of knowledge keeping and an important mode for asserting sovereignty. By itself the seemingly simple act of Native people telling stories, with its implicit insistence that those truths obtain, is political, because Native stories refuse to conform to benign narratives of settler colonialism that safely situate Natives in the past. In fact, Native people, especially Native women, must work continually to resist what Lisa Kahaleole Hall has termed "strategies of erasure" that work to conceal the Native and the female in imperial optics. This essay considers past and present Native women authors and storytellers who told their stories, insisted upon being made visible on the page, and made the Indigenous origins and underpinnings of those stories plainly evident. Following current practice in Native American and Indigenous studies, I use the term Native to include all indigenous peoples, whom I define as those whose traditional territories have been usurped by settler populations and who have remained disempowered, antagonistically educated, underfed, and pauperized in their own land via settler colonialisms that Patrick Wolfe has rightly identified as "structure" and not "event" (388). Throughout this essay, I will make conscious connections to important trends in areas not traditionally understood in American literary critical circles to be germane to American Indian studies scholarship; as I do, I will explain their relationships to the field and how their contributions apply to the literatures studied by readers of Legacy. Thus, while acknowledging the sovereigntist roots of many of these texts, [End Page 198] this essay engages the strategies of a transnational Native American studies, as defined by Hsinya Huang, Philip Deloria, Laura Furlan, and John Gamber, by connecting the Native American to the Native Hawaiian to the Alaska Native and so on (1–3). The term sovereigntist denotes those scholars (and their texts) who self-identify as nationalist with a core emphasis upon advancing Native sovereignty (that is, self-determination); this impulse constitutes a distinct and predominant strand in Native American literary criticism at present, as evident in work by Lisa Brooks, Daniel Justice, Robert Warrior, Craig Womack, and many others. I am also alive to the fact that my translation of my field to Legacy readers reiterates a pattern, from contact to the present, of Native women writers and storytellers making legible their unique experiences and histories to non-Natives; these educative moments of translation are important for continually rendering the Native visible in a nation that imagines itself as possible only via Natives' disappearance. kellogg and bonnin: politics, networks, letters, and literature Literature shall be my life work, and its aim shall be to benefit my people. Laura Cornelius Kellogg, "One Indian Maiden: Her Literary Plans for the Uplifting of Her Race" (1903) As scholars have made clear since Native American literary studies emerged as a distinct field in the 1970s and 1980s, Native American women's writing is often inherently political, and attempts to enforce apoliticism would render it meaningless and extraneous. Native women write with a keen awareness of the unique history of Native American political structures of governance, the obfuscation of deep and rich intellectual traditions, the erasure of histories acknowledging the sacrifice of the indigene upon which the settler colonial state is predicated, and the necessity of organizing and speaking from the space of Indigenous political consciousness (that is, sovereignty and resurgence), whether based in traditional governance structures or in the non-Native governmental forms intentionally imposed upon Native peoples via and through the treaty and reservation confinement periods. A range of recently published works on Native American women writers highlights exactly these thematics of the political and the literary. Kristina Ackley and Cristina Stanciu's scholarly edition of Laura Cornelius Kellogg's Our Democracy and the American Indian and Other Works is one such volume, exploring an oft-overlooked but integral and arguably paramount figure in pre-1930 American Indian literary and political [End Page 199] circles. Born in 1880...

Introduction: Transnational American Studies in the "Age of Trump"

Author(s): Kim, Sabine; Robinson, Greg | Abstract: Introduction by issue editors.This issue represents our journal’s first appearance after the onset of what multiple Americanists have referred to, and not in overly positive fashion, as the “Age of Trump.” A central theme of Trump administration discourse is its strident defense of physical borders manifested in harshly exclusionary policies, most notably the administration’s abandoning of the existing DACA program, as well as fostering increased visibility of white nationalist groups and openly racist discourse. At the same time, the White House, led by the president, has distinguished itself by its nationalist attacks on international trade and multilateral diplomacy. As scholars of American Studies based outside the United States, we both feel a special responsibility to make use of our position to investigate and discuss the larger forces at play here. One thing that larger transnational approaches can help reveal is the complex interface between national identity, domestic politics, and state policy, especially in regard to international relations.

The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness by Paula Ioanide

Reviewed by: The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness by Paula Ioanide Erin L. Murphy Paula Ioanide, The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. 288 pp. In the social sciences, there is a dearth of scholarship connecting the politics of emotion with the politics of racism. Paula loanide's work in The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness makes a significant contribution toward filling this gap by showing the ways in which emotion reinforces structural and institutional racism. With this project, she argues that we need to recognize public feelings as currency in emotional economies, a metaphor that captures how many US citizens feel about an investment in gendered and racial discrimination and violence, which comes to be expressed through political desires, pleasures, fears, and/or anxieties. By focusing on the impact of emotions on political debates, Ioanide beckons us to consider how to more effectively achieve racial and gendered justice when skeptics and opponents dismiss and/or disavow social scientific facts that have been carefully accumulated over decades of research. As she astutely frames it, the problem is that, unfortunately, facts by themselves don't debunk the stereotypes. This is because emotions shape our "sense of realness" and buttress racial and gender ideologies (2). Therefore, loanide rejects notions that only gathering more data to disprove the latest neoliberal, racist, and sexist discourse blaming the most marginalized groups for their discrimination will be effective in itself. Rather, she argues persuasively that anti-racist and feminist scholarship and practices need to incorporate knowledge of emotions as well as account for the weight of ideological fantasies in constructing realities. She aptly characterizes her book in the title, which also signals the structure of the text as she takes four cases where emotional [End Page 323] attachments to racist stereotypes are marshaled against the groups who are under attack. As she covers the expansive ground laid out in these cases, her narrative is sensitive, moving, and necessarily upsetting. She follows in the steps of Herbert Blumer (1958) in his classic work on race prejudice. He asserted that race is socially constructed through the sense of being part of a racial group and that that sense of groupness has influential feelings attached to it. Ioanide also considers feelings of race prejudice from the "emotional and psychological impact of losing white cultural dominance" with local demographic shifts to the "pleasurable thrills or psychological losses" when white police officers sexually and physically brutalize immigrants and people of color (2). Along with the sense of racial groupness comes the ideology of American exceptionalism, which is the belief that the United States and its people are morally and politically superior to other nations. Ioanide also builds on insights from critical American Studies scholars, like Amy Kaplan (1993) and Donald Pease (2009), noting how ideological fantasies of American exceptionalism and white superiority are built upon practices of "disavowal," where facts or arguments that would contradict beliefs in American superiority are conveniently ignored, denied, or dismissed. After a gripping and theoretically grounded introduction that assesses the violence and racism of the color-blind era, Part I transitions the reader to the strongest chapter for demonstrating how to connect the historical details of a case to the theoretical insights raised in the introduction. Chapter 1 covers the rage of white police brutality in New York through the horrors of the physical and sexual violence the Haitian immigrant Abner Louima suffered in 1997. After it became public that police officer Joshua Volpe raped Louima with a broomstick in the police department bathroom as he was held for questioning, the public became horrified, and Louima's allies immediately marched to protest. Giuliani had set the stage for the brutality by passing punitive policing measures with racially coded law and order rhetoric to protect corporations and the wealthy, while further marginalizing impoverished populations. The story of Volpe's wanton violence and Louima's resistance afterward shows how police can experience incredible rage at the thought of people, like a Haitian immigrant man, challenging their authority. Louima's perseverance...

Drawing New Color Lines: Transnational Asian American Graphic Narratives ed. by Monica Chiu

Reviewed by: Drawing New Color Lines: Transnational Asian American Graphic Narratives ed. by Monica Chiu Jeanette Roan (bio) Drawing New Color Lines: Transnational Asian American Graphic Narratives, edited by Monica Chiu. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015. 336 pp. $69.00 hardcover. ISBN: 978-988-8139-38-5. Monica Chiu's Drawing New Color Lines: Transnational Asian American Graphic Narratives is a welcome contribution to the small but growing body of scholarship on Asian American graphic narratives and comics creators. Despite the increasing visibility of Asian Americans in comics—an article in the December 2011 issue of KoreAm was titled "Why Are There So Many Good Asian American Cartoonists?"—there has not yet been an entire book devoted to the subject. As Chiu notes in her introduction though, this collection is not intended to "fill a gap" in comics studies scholarship, nor is it meant as "a catalog of new Asian American graphic narratives and their scholarly interpretations" (13). Drawing New Color Lines, which originated in a Fulbright award at the University of Hong Kong and an international seminar on Asian American graphic narratives, situates itself within the "transnational turn" in Asian American studies. The fifteen essays of the work, accompanied by nineteen black-and-white figures and twenty-one beautifully reproduced color plates, are divided into three parts, each with a distinct focus. The first section, "Comics, Caricatures, and Race in North America," offers essays written by scholars based in the United States about the politics of representation in works by critically acclaimed North American comics creators. The second section, "North American Representations of Race across the Pacific," takes up transnationalism in many different forms, including the institutional affiliations of the included scholars, reception contexts, and the content of the graphic narratives themselves. The essays of the third section, "Manga Goes West and Returns," consider manga's established conventions and global popularity as a point of departure for discussions of original English language (OEL) manga and North American graphic novels. Drawing New Color Lines demonstrates how established lines of inquiry in Asian American studies can be both extended and challenged in the study of graphic narratives. Asian American studies scholars will find many familiar topics analyzed in relation to perhaps unfamiliar texts. Lan Dong considers the model minority myth in Gene Luen Yang's and Thien Pham's Level Up. Catherine Ceniza Choy shows how Jenifer K Wofford humanizes Filipino immigrant nurses in her public art project Flor de Manila y San Francisco. Cathy J. Schlund-Vials examines representations of the American war in Vietnam and its effects upon U.S. soldiers in two issues of The Amazing Spider-Man. However, as Chiu suggests in her introduction, graphic narratives can also present challenges to familiar ways of imaging and imagining race (3). Ralph E. Rodriguez uses Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings to argue for what he calls a "surface reading of race" (87), while Jaqueline Berndt persuasively demonstrates how a use-related [End Page 304] analysis that is attentive to surrounding mediascapes can highlight the cultural specificity of racial signifiers. The third section of the book in particular, which includes Berndt's essay, questions common assumptions about the visualization of racial and ethnic identity. For example, Angela Moreno Acosta traces the complex constructions of "Japaneseness" and authenticity in North American translations of manga and, consequently, in OEL manga. In a separate contribution, one of the most original in the collection, Acosta redraws a sequence from Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese using elements of manga style. The accompanying text by Berndt highlights how much Yang's narrative is transformed in the process. Drawing New Color Lines also suggests how much Asian American studies can enrich comics studies, which has only recently begun to grapple with questions of race and representation. Chiu's introduction thoughtfully situates the collection in relation to comics studies scholarship, and although only this introduction, her essay on Tamaki's and Tamaki's Skim, and Berndt's contribution engage deeply with contemporary comics theory, the collection broadens comics studies through both the works it examines as well as the questions it asks. Familiar names such as Gene Luen Yang, Derek Kirk Kim, and Adrian Tomine...

African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom

This ambitious book aims to reshape the field of African American religious history, long dominated by a narrative pointing toward freedom, civil rights, and justice. Johnson audaciously proposes to point it in another direction, toward empire, and by pointing in that direction he compels us to examine everything involved in the rise of the concept of race, corporate economic forms, and the rise of the modern nation-state. Race here is defined here as “colonial governance administered through the frame of essential differences among human populations” (p. 88). The book is not a narrative history of African American religions. Instead, it is a deliberately selective examination of key moments connecting the themes of colonialism, democracy, and freedom, with an emphasis on their intersections with a variety of African American religious traditions. The argument fundamentally challenges scholars in African American religious studies to foreground state power over alienated subjects rather than narrate stories of freedom from enslaving or colonizing powers. The subjects range from the interaction of African kingdoms and European slaving companies in West Africa to settler colonies in North America to nineteenth-century settler colonies in Liberia and elsewhere to Marcus Garvey and the dream of a black empire in the twentieth century to black “ethnic religions” such as the Moorish Science Temple to state-sponsored surveillance and harassment of civil rights activists to the national security state and the racialization of Islam over the last generation (p. 294). The scope is vast, the stories within them are compelling, the language is formal and sometimes highly theoretical, and the argument is astringent and relentlessly tough. The result is a landmark work in the field and the creation of a new paradigm that will initiate conversations and foster intense arguments.

Searching for Anglo-American Digital Legal History

As the fields of digital humanities and digital history have grown in scale and visibility since the 1990s, legal history has largely remained on the margins of those fields. The move to make material available online in the first decade of the web featured only a small number of legal history projects: Famous Trials; Anglo-American Legal Tradition; The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online, 1674–1913. Early efforts to construct hypertext narratives and scholarship also included some works of legal history: “Hearsay of the Sun: Photography, Identity and the Law of Evidence in Nineteenth-Century Courts,” in Hypertext Scholarship in American Studies; Who Killed William Robinson? and Gilded Age Plains City: The Great Sheedy Murder Trial and the Booster Ethos of Lincoln, Nebraska. In the second decade of the web, the focus shifted from distributing material to exploring it using digital tools. The presence of digital history grew at the meetings of organizations of historians ranging from the American Historical Association to the Urban History Association, but not at the American Society for Legal History conferences, the annual meetings of the Law and Society Association, or the British Legal History Conference. Only a few Anglo-American legal historians took up computational tools for sorting and visualizing sources such as data mining, text mining, and topic modeling; network analysis; and mapping. Paul Craven and Douglas Hay's Master and Servant project text mined a comprehensive database of 2,000 statutes and 1,200,000 words to explore similarities and influence among statutes. Data Mining with Criminal Intent mined and visualized the words in trial records using structured data from The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online, 1674–1913. Locating London's Past, a project that mapped resources relating to the early modern and eighteenth century city, and also made use of the Old Bailey records. Digital Harlem mapped crime in the context of everyday life in the 1920s. Only in the past few years has more digital legal history using computational tools begun to appear, and like many of the projects discussed in this special issue, most remain at a preliminary stage. This article seeks to bring into focus the constraints, possibilities, and choices that shape digital legal history, in order to create a context for the work in this special issue, and to promote discussion of what it means to do legal history in the digital age.

The Cherokee Kid: Will Rogers, Tribal Identity, and the Making of an American Icon. By Amy M. Ware

The Cherokee Kid: Will Rogers, Tribal Identity, and the Making of an American Icon . CultureAmerica Series. By Amy M. Ware. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015. x + 317 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $37.50.) “Was Will Rogers Really an Indian?” Amy M. Ware posits at the start of The Cherokee Kid (p. xi). Her study of Rogers’s personal politics of identity and the Cherokee roots of his performance art and public impact leaves little doubt of the answer. Ware synthesizes evidence mined from previously published works by and about Rogers with the newest standards of scholarship in Native American studies, offering her own deep reading of Rogers’s choices and words. The result is a multilayered elucidation of Rogers’s Indianness, Cherokeeness, and transnational citizenship in … bbai{at}loc.gov

Proceduralism, Predisposing, Poesis: Forms of Institutionality, In the Making

A response to the forum, “Emergent Critical Analytics for Alternative Humanities,” edited by Chris A. Eng and Amy K. King. Jodi Melamed reassesses the analytic of institutionality, which has largely been theorized as a dominant tool of the university in incorporating the emergent and muting the oppositional. In particular, scholars in American and cultural studies have noted how universities responded to the revolutionary calls of radical social movements by institutionalizing ethnic and gender studies into compartmentalized sets of knowledge production. In so doing, the university worked to manage minority difference through flat notions of representation rather than redistribution. The interdisciplines of ethnic and gender studies then became additives to the humanities, upholding the status quo rather than compelling a radical re-envisioning of these academic structures altogether. On an even more macro level, Melamed identifies dominant discussions of institutionality that see global neoliberalism as a new, all-totalizing force. In problematizing how these theorizations elide considerations of the historical conditions of racial capitalism that make possible the ‘global,’ Melamed also excavates a genealogy of radical resistance that might allow us to rethink institutionality toward collective solidarity.

American Studies, the Middle East, and the Question of Palestine

This essay examines the intellectual history of American studies programs and departments in the Middle East, especially the relationship of these programs to US State Department efforts at cultural diplomacy or “soft power” after the Cold War. Through this examination, the essay theorizes the relationship of transnational American studies scholarship in the Middle East to the internationalization of the field. In their efforts to understand the United States, American studies programs in the Middle East have foregrounded the question of Palestine in ways that make these programs distinct from US-based American studies programs that still often regard Palestine as “America’s last taboo.” In their insistence on centering the question of Palestine within their vision of American studies, American studies programs in the Middle East demonstrate the unruly consequences of the internationalization of the discipline in political geographies where American primacy and exceptionalism are contested.

America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture by Erik Dussere (review)

Reviewed by: America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture by Erik Dussere Christopher Breu Erik Dussere. America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 2013. 299pp. There are as many narratives of noir’s development as there are definitions of noir. Notoriously difficult to define in positive qualities, noir has variously been described as a genre; a mood; a subspecies of crime and detective narratives (filmic or novelistic); or, as I have argued elsewhere, a negative deformation or volatilization of other genres. Even as its stylistic roots in European movements like expressionism and existentialism have been acknowledged, noir is often described as a distinctly American phenomenon. Thus, the negativity and darkness ascribed to noir are seen as part of a negative exceptionalism, a homegrown critique of the culture and politics of the US that is simultaneously its distinctive product. While there has been a range of recent work on noir as a distinctly global phenomenon (Jennifer Fay and Justus Nieland’s Film Noir: Hard-Boiled Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization, for example), the negative exceptionalist paradigm central to a great deal of writing on noir is still very much alive and well. One can glean as much from reading Erik Dussere’s America Is Elsewhere. Both the power and the limitations of Dussere’s book can be linked to its redeployment of this negative exceptionalist paradigm. His argument hinges on the opposition between postwar consumer culture and notions of authenticity he sees at the heart of noir: “what I have been calling the ‘dialectic’ of authenticity and consumer culture staged by the texts in the noir tradition is a crucial, perhaps a constitutive, component of American self-understanding in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries” (247). As this emphasis on “American self-understanding” suggests, Dussere’s argument is cast in the dialectics of American identity central to an older tradition of American studies that runs from, say, Perry Anderson through Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin to Sacvan Bercovitch. Indeed, a careful and rich reading of Trilling’s concept of authenticity underpins Dussere’s negative exceptionalist account of the opposition between the “two Americas,” in which the two versions of the nation “occupy the same geographical space, with the visible and consumerist republic twinned by the alternative, dispossessed America beneath” (132). While Dussere cites more recent American studies scholars, such as Donald Pease and Deborah Madsen, who present more searching critiques of the rhetoric of exceptionalism that challenge the fantasy of a singular American self, his model of the “two Americas” harkens back to Bercovitch’s model of American disensus, in which the jeremiad is the dominant form of expression. [End Page 158] Part of Dussere’s investment in the concept of American authenticity is bound up with the version of noir his book chooses to narrate. One way to think about the noir narrative is in terms of different schools centered on paradigmatic writers or practices of filmmaking. Thus, we can talk about the James M. Cain school of noir; the Dashiell Hammett school; the Chester Himes school; the Patricia Highsmith school; the classic Hollywood school; the French New Wave school; the Nikkatsu school; the schools associated with international noir writers like Natsuo Kirnio, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, and Stieg Larsson; and others. Each of these schools carries within it a set of assumptions about noir that shapes the story told by the critic. Thus, if the critic’s account is narrated in relationship to the Hollywood, Hammett, or Taibo schools, she will tend to read a continuity between narratives that focus on the figure of the hard-boiled detective and petty criminals, while a critic working within the Cain, Highsmith, or Kirino schools might make a much stronger distinction between hard-boiled fiction (privileging the figure of the hard-boiled detective) and noir proper (which tends to narrate the lives of petty criminals and two-time losers who wind up on the wrong side of the law). The national or international dimensions of the narrative would also be shaped by the school the critic affiliates with as well as who he includes within the school...

Beyond Two Worlds: Critical Conversations on Language and Power in Native North America. Edited by James Joseph Buss and C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa.

Beyond Two Worlds: Critical Conversations on Language and Power in Native North America . Tribal Worlds: Critical Studies in American Indian Nation Building Series. Edited by James Joseph Buss and C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa. (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014. xvi + 331 pp. Illustrations, charts, notes, index. $95.00.) For well over a decade, scholars in Native American studies have steadily dismantled the false divide between indigeneity and authenticity, which goes something like this: Native people can be modern or they can be Native—but never both. If they embrace modernity, they cease to be “real Indians.” If they reject modernity, then they fade into the past, unable to navigate the changing tides of contemporary societies. Beyond Two Worlds aptly brings critiques of this idea, which have thus far come from a variety … kwhalen{at}morris.umn.edu