US Academia Research Articles

McCrack: McOndo, el Crack y los destinos de la literatura latinoamericana ed. by Brescia, Pablo and Oswaldo Estrada

Reviewed by: McCrack: McOndo, el Crack y los destinos de la literatura latinoamericana ed. by Brescia, Pablo and Oswaldo Estrada Ryan Long Brescia, Pablo, y Oswaldo Estrada, editores. McCrack: McOndo, el Crack y los destinos de la literatura latinoamericana. Albatros Ediciones, 2018. 270 pp. Pablo Brescia and Oswaldo Estrada’s anthology opens and closes with the contributions of Pedro Ángel Palou, Edmundo Paz Soldán, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Naief Yehya. Its final section is a group interview that took place just after ¿Nuestra América? Pasado y futuro de la nueva narrativa latinoamericana, the 2016 conference whose presentations became the starting point for the anthology. In the interview, Palou recalls that, during two public presentations of the Crack, including the initial reading of its manifesto in 1996, Ignacio Padilla was absent and that his brother stood in for him, apparently unannounced and in an effort to convince audiences that he was, in fact, the Padilla they came to see. Attention to historical details and the effects of mistaken identities are useful starting points for evaluating the anthology’s important contribution to recent and contemporary Latin American literary history and criticism. The book’s first section consists of four chapters written, respectively, by Paz Soldán, Palou, Yehya, and Rivera Garza. The chapters that make up the remaining three sections are written by students, professors, and other scholars from Europe and the Americas. Framing the anthology with texts and interview statements by writers foregrounds one of the book’s central contributions, its detailed history of the ways in which several forces overlap in the formation of literary fields. These include primarily academia, publishing houses, cultural journalism, original language and translation markets, and the two group efforts identified in the anthology’s title, the Crack and McOndo. Brescia’s chapter emphasizes how much Latin American literature has been defined as a field from within the United States. Brescia’s emphasis thus complements Rivera Garza’s observations in her chapter about how important it is to recognize that many contemporary writers are also academics in the US, including Palou, Paz Soldán, and herself. The institutional boundary crossings germane to this fact are similar to the other complexities related to defining Latin American literature in the present, which several chapters address. The importance of the Spanish publishing industry and US academia call into question, for example, the coherency of traditional geographically bound ways of conceiving Latin America as an organizing principle for literary history. The cosmopolitanism and attention to Latin Americans living in the US that helped define the Crack and McOndo from the beginning are thus prescient. On the other hand, chapters by Rita De Maeseneer and Catalina Quesada-Gómez, about the Caribbean and Colombia, respectively, demonstrate the need for considerations of local and regional contexts, whose specificities might otherwise be blurred by discussions of hemispheric and global trends, be they aesthetic or, as is more often the case, economic. The historical details elucidated and questioned by the writers who contribute to the anthology—from Yehya’s critique of the so-called culture of excellence that began to permeate the UNAM in the 1980s to Rivera Garza’s description of [End Page 859] the Crack and McOndo anthologies as “hechas por hombres para ser consumidas por hombres” (259)—put the eponymous movements in their places more than most of the literary historical chapters do. For example, De Maeseneer argues convincingly that the movements’ relevance is at least as much a product of critics and historians as it is of the texts their authors have written, including founding anthologies and manifestos. Here is where the question of mistaken identity arises. Are the Crack and McOndo strong enough phenomena, as foundational moments, to sustain a literary history organized around them? Or, with all due respect to Bob Dylan, are some critics seeing them less for what they are then what they’re not? Tomás Regalado López’s history of the Crack proves that it deserves the attention he gives it, for the writers who comprise it and for, again, that observation that, in part, guides the whole anthology, “la función de la crítica como instancia mediadora clave” (87...

Passages, Transits, Flows: Thinking Central American Literature Across Space, Time, and Capital

Passages, Transits, Flows:Thinking Central American Literature Across Space, Time, and Capital Sophie Esch For centuries, Central America has been thought of and read in relation to the particular geography of the region. The figure of the isthmus is undoubtedly the most central. Located on a narrow stretch of land that connects North and South America and separates the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, the strategic location and shape of the land mass has played a crucial role in the historical-cultural development of the region now divided into seven independent nation-states—Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama. The geography has defined the region as a place of transit. It has meant that Central America is a part of the Caribbean and the region developed in close proximity to the two colossi in the North, Mexico and the USA. Other factors such as seismic activity, climate, and agriculture have had a profound impact on the region's historical and political development, too. The geography has left its trace on the region's literary-intellectual thought. There is Ernesto Cardenal's Estrecho dudoso, José Coronel Urtecho's Rápido tránsito, Eunice Odio's El tránsito de fuego, Sergio Ramírez's Balcanes y volcanes, and from the diaspora, Desde el EpiCentro co-edited by Karina Oliva Alvarado and Maya Chinchilla. Two academic journals dedicated to Central American literature and culture are named after the isthmus, Istmo and Revista Ístimica, and one of the most important journalistic endeavors of recent years is El Faro, a lighthouse towering above the isthmus, shedding light on the region. Within US academia, Ana Patricia Rodríguez's Dividing the Isthmus is a key book that aims "to provide spatial-cultural readings of Central America" (2). This propensity is, of course, not without problems. For once, there is certainly a risk of seeing the region's history as overdetermined by its geography (7). In addition, the dominant spatial imaginary of Central America is one that markedly comes from foreign views imposed upon the space, in particular from nineteenth-century travel writing. In this [End Page 7] view, space, time, and money became linked (I. Rodríguez 35). Members of the Central American elites often adopted or shared the outsiders' gaze upon the land and the question of the capitalization of space became central to national and regional imaginaries (33–35). Nonetheless, opposing views always existed, too, which resisted projects of commodification and modernization via infrastructure and export-oriented agriculture. Objections and polemics notwithstanding, spatial economic-cultural thought is central to Central American/ist production; it continues to structure thinking about the region. This dossier, titled Passages: Routes of Migration and Memory in Central American Literature, takes up this spatial tradition in an effort to introduce a broader non-Central Americanist audience to it, and at the same time to expand it by thinking about Central American literature within a series of passages. A place of transit, the small region has been an important imagined, realized, and frustrated space for flows of people, goods, and ideas. This dossier analyzes Central America as a space constantly created, reimagined, expanded, and constructed through passages—literary and otherwise. Passages, transits, and routes lie at the heart of the Central American experience, the conceptualization of the region, as well as its literature. The meaning of the word "passage" ranges far and wide. It can mean "a way of exit or entrance: a road, path, channel, or course by which something passes," "the action or process of passing from one place, condition, or stage to another," "a specific act of traveling or passing especially by sea or air," "a right, liberty, or permission to pass," or "a continuous movement or flow" (Merriam Webster). This dossier highlights the interlinked dynamics of space, capital, time, and people by focusing primarily on passages and routes of migration and memory.1 Passages and Cardinal Directions Interoceanic passageways are certainly Central America's most famed passages. The Spanish conquistadors' feverish search for a "doubtful strait" (Cardenal) soon turned into a similar fever dream of a man-made strait: an interoceanic canal. For a long time, the San Juan River and...

Provincializing Whiteness

Provincializing whiteness—this deconstructing move lays bare the absolute power of racial supremacy that faculty of color housed in communication studies and other departments have faced in US academia. Yet, acts of racial supremacy reveal how provincial that way of thinking is. There is a plethora of her-his-stories that are better suited to coexistence and tolerance without privileging Western modernity.

Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature, by Gloria Fisk

Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature, by Gloria Fisk

Facilitating queer of color feminist co-mentorship: reflections on an online archive of scholar-activism

We reflect on our relationship to the Feminist Freedom Warriors (FFW) online archive of transnational scholar-activist genealogies. From our respective locations at a PWI and an HBCU, we explore what it might mean to conceive of these new media narratives as archives of mentorship. For us, the archive is a significant resource of useful feminism–those modes of feminist thought, action, and history that meet our mentorship needs, stitching together practices of self-mentorship and co-mentorship. Our engagement with the narratives sharpen an understanding of how intertwined structures of gender, race, sexuality, caste and class operate at both the local and global level, and are facilitated by and through US academia. Moreover, the larger constellation of FFW inspire our own practice of ‘queer of color feminist co-mentorship’. We generate a collaborative analysis detailing our expanding perspectives on identity, difference, and the US graduate school experience. Our collective journey informs us that innovative conceptions and practices of feminist mentorship can radically challenge and enhance traditional mentorship, creating novel possibilities for learning and connection.

Overcoming the “Other’s” Stigma: Arab and Muslim Representations in US Media and Academia

The present work focuses on Arab and Muslim representations in U.S. media and academia. It suggests to offer an overview of the collective and often stereotyped image of such categories amidst shifting ideological and political contexts. While it rests upon deep investigation of the literature underlying Orientalist discourse, it by no means aims to delve into the controversy purporting to the core tenets of such an age-old trend tackled extensively by renowned scholars like Edward Said and Jack Shaheen. Rather, it endeavors to contribute novel insights into the way Arabs and Muslims are depicted and perceived in the United states, by deconstructing certain Orientalist binary frames to demonstrate, ultimately, how both spheres of influence (media and academia) mimic the same political language and work in conjunction to propagate a Eurocentric culture. The study, eventually, adopts a quantitative approach based on the analysis of literature contents using statistical data to justify and substantiate discussed arguments. It, regrettably, does not cover all American media outlets due to the immensely broad scope of the addressed matter.

A teoria das classes de Pierre Bourdieu

O que explica a enorme popularidade da teoria crítica de Bourdieu na academia e, particularmente, na sociologia dos EUA? Este ensaio examina duas respostas. Uma é que Bourdieu oferece uma explicação macrossociológica convincente da sociedade contemporânea, à altura daquelas de Marx, Weber ou Durkheim. Entretanto, um exame mais rigoroso mostra que Bourdieu falha nessa empreitada. Seu trabalho não oferece nem uma análise das classes ancorada empiricamente, nem uma explicação da reprodução ou da mudança sociais. Assim, concluo que a popularidade de Bourdieu não pode ser resultado do poder de suas explicações. Há, porém, uma segunda resposta: a sociologia de Bourdieu é popular por causa das condições sociais específicas à academia dos EUA hoje. Nesse contexto, em que intelectuais ganham recompensas ao perseguir uma estratégia de distinção, em que eles não têm muita conexão organizativa com os movimentos populares e em que seus interesses materiais se encontram na defesa de seus privilégios, a sociologia de Bourdieu é altamente atrativa. Ela efetivamente ressoa a experiência vivida dos acadêmicos e serve para articular seus interesses políticos mais fundamentais.

Chinese American scientists uneasy amid crackdown on foreign influence.

Government concerns are also posing difficulties for US academia at large. Government concerns are also posing difficulties for US academia at large.

The research on modernity in Latin America: Lineages and dilemmas

Conventional research on modernity has interpreted Latin American experiences as lagging behind, as expressions of an ‘incomplete’ or failed modernity, since they do not meet the conditions of a ‘complete’ achievement of modernity as described by theories developed within European and, later, US academia. Since the emergence of dependency theory in the 1960s, and more emphatically since the 1990s, after the dissemination of postcolonial and decolonial theories in the region, this still dominant interpretation has been challenged by new approaches which convincingly underline the interdependent development of global modernity. This article reconstructs part of these debates and identifies a number of different lineages in current research on modernity in Latin America: a first lineage which describes modernization in Latin America as a mimicry of European/Western modernity; a second lineage which characterizes modernity as a global transformation activated by the colonial annexation of the Americas into capital accumulation; and an intermediary lineage which also recognizes the importance of colonialism in shaping global modernity, but at the same time underlines the European origin of modern emancipatory imaginaries.

“Why Don't You Speak (Up), Asian/Immigrant/Woman?” Rethinking Silence and Voice through Family Oral History

This essay deploys a disruptive moment of giving up tenure to rethink silence and voice in the context of institutional whiteness from the standpoint of a racialized Asian/immigrant/woman faculty. I narrate moments during my first tenure-track years weathering the quiet and invisible storms of whiteness at a historically white institution in the Midwestern United States. In (re)writing my story, I (re)orient my identity as an immigrant Other in US academia, reclaiming my family's oral history to inform my ways of speaking in/with comforting silence. I conclude with a discussion of racialized acts of speaking (up) as an interactive rather than singular moment.

Romanian Studies and Area Studies — A Necessary Re-examination

During the Cold War, the former “satellites” of the former USSR were approached, in the US academia and, consequently, in security studies, under the umbrella of Area Studies. The study of the languages and cultures of those countries, among which Romania was one made the core of Area Studies. The seminal book of Charles Jelavich (Jelavich, 1969) set the standard for Area Studies in the region, and stated clearly the role of languages and national literatures in the field. Shortly after, Richard Lambert (Lambert, 1973) coordinated an ample review of the status of the language/area studies in Central and Eastern Europe, which showed serious imbalances within a field that was supposed to appear homogeneous. His research was based on the number of enrollments, as well as on the academic/social relevance of the academic programs. The fracture within Area Studies in the region deepened after 1989, when the Post-Communist countries faced individual issues that raised different types of research/academic/security interests in the US. Based on my personal experience as a Romanian language and culture instructor and curriculum designer at the Nicolae Iorga Chair at Columbia University (Romanian Language Institute), the article will examine the status of Romanian Studies within the new ideological landscape. Caught between the irreversible fears of the postmodernist “millennialism” (see, Jameson, 1998), and the in-betweenness (Chakrabarty, 1998) brought by globalization, Romanian Studies, and Area Studies in general have faced a rapid adoption of theoretical ‘parlances’, some of which are incompatible with the very nature of the field, yet they make the field ‘recognizable’ and ‘user-friendly’.

The world view of the Atlantic ruling class as academic discipline

The disciplinary structure of academia achieved its contemporary form in the USA. It combined the agnostic empiricism pioneered in England with the strategy of North American business to create an academic intelligence base to support its national and transnational hegemony. When Woodrow Wilson intervened in World War I, the world view of the most advanced elements in the Anglo-American ruling class that world order should be organised around a white English-speaking heartland found its expression in a strategy of projecting a Lockean liberal universe of sovereign nation-states open for business. The Russian Revolution only added urgency to this programme whilst shaping a subordinate strategy of confrontation and regime change. In the 1920s Walter Lippmann, the confidant of Wilson’s circle and his emissary to the British ruling class proposed reorganising US academia to serve policy planning as an academic intelligence base. Out of it grew an infrastructure of politics and IR research and policy advice although it was only after the influx of emigre scholars fleeing Nazi Europe that the post-war discipline obtained the intellectual capital to enable it to sweep across Europe and on to the rest of the world.

Middle East Politics in US Academia

In their recent book, Anthropology's Politics: Disciplining the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2016), Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar provide the first academic study of how political and economic pressures shape the way scholars based in the United States research and teach about the Middle East. Lila Abu-Lughod, a member of the journal's editorial board, recently talked with the authors about the dynamics of the field. The book's final chapter examines the movement among anthropologists in support of a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Just after the book's publication, the issue came to a vote at the American Anthropological Association. Abu-Lughod asks the authors whether their research enables us to understand the outcome of the vote.

Higher education: The making of US academia

Rogers Hollingsworth traces the European influence on US research universities that began some 150 years ago.

증기제트 충돌하중 평가를 위한 CFD 해석

Since, in case of high energy piping, steam jets ejected from the rupture zone may cause damage to nearby structure, it is necessary to design it into consideration of nuclear power plant design. For the existing nuclear power plants, the ANSI / ANS 58.2 technical standard for high-energy pipe rupture was used. However, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC) and academia recently have pointed out the non-conservativeness of existing high energy pipe fracture evaluation methods. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a highly reliable evaluation methodology to evaluate the behavior of steam jet ejected during high energy pipe rupture and the effect of steam jet on peripheral devices and structures. In this study, we develop a method for analyzing the impact load of a jet by high energy pipe rupture, and plan to carry out an experiment to verify the evaluation methodology. In this paper, the basic data required for the design of the jet impact load experiment equipment under construction, 1) the load change according to the jet distance, 2) the load change according to the jet collision angle, 3) the load variation according to structure diameter, and 4) the load variation depending on the jet impact position, are numerically obtained using the developed steam jet analysis technique.

Agamben at Legon, or, Teaching “Theory” in an African University

Critical theory, especially the poststructuralist variant from which postcolonial studies draws its institutional support in US academia, is unthinkable outside of a philosophical tradition that goes back to Plato and is assumed to be Western. African studies, in and out of academia, is notably captious of critical theory, a result both of the field’s beginnings in the empiricist traditions of the social sciences and of the reflexive nationalist impulse among Africana scholars and activists who perceive critical theory as imperialism by other means. Is “theory” a singular intellectual phenomenon? Does it truly have a location? Is this location the “West”? Should (and how does) one teach it to students in African universities? In this essay I approach “theory” as the mode of intellectual practice in which ideas generated in different contexts and for different purposes are deployed in studying the world at a given moment. I address the questions posed here through two propositions, each elaborated as a particular kind of intellectual undertaking, personal and collective. First, by focusing on acts of practical and cultural translation and identifying the values of specific kinds of theoretical thinking in understanding contemporary African realities, I propose that ideas do not respect boundaries and wide reading is indispensable to the development of sensibilities that recognize difference. Second, I propose that realities everywhere are legitimate material for theoretical elaboration, using the example of philosopher Paulin Hountondji’s work on “endogenous knowledge”, In conclusion, I make a case for a model of intellectual practice that strikes a balance between personal and collective pursuits.

Anthropology’s Politics: Disciplining the Middle East by Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar

Reviewed by: Anthropology’s Politics: Disciplining the Middle East by Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar Michelle Obeid Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar, Anthropology’s Politics: Disciplining the Middle East. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. 288 pp. Anthropology’s Politics is one of the rare (if not first) attempts to “turn the ethnographic gaze” (4) onto anthropologists and to explore what it means to be an anthropologist of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in American academia. Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar offer us an ethnographically engaging and rich exploration of a community of scholars who have been historically sidelined in the field of (American) Anthropology by virtue of the region they work on. In recent years, the targeting of scholars working on the MENA region in the US and the punishing actions taken against them (including termination of employment and un-hiring), have received controversial and high profile news coverage. The book shows how the treatment of these scholars is not an exception, but rather an “extreme version of common experiences” (54). Through a focus on mundane experiences of discrimination, the authors tease out the “intricate and historically constituted set of power relations” (4) that shape academic environments and disciplinary scopes: what scholars research, write, teach, speak about publically, and publish in relation to the MENA region are all shaped and molded by these power relations. The book differentiates five generations of scholars who have worked in very different political contexts and who are by no means a unified or homogeneous community. Yet, what unites generations of MENA anthropologists is a shared experience of pressure, hostility, and threat against any critical engagement with different US and Israeli governments and their policies. Particularly, the authors examine the workings of a “compulsory version of Zionism” that permeates US academia and that stifles attempts [End Page 993] to humanize Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, an issue that anthropologists of the region perceive to be at the heart of their job. While attacks on academic freedom go back to the McCarthy era, if not earlier, the authors argue that the post-9/11 period saw a heightened if not unusual form of assault that has emerged out of a variety of factors: “new media technologies, the Patriot Act, the rise of private advocacy groups (especially right wing and Zionist political organizations), the narrowing and militarization of government–academic funding relationships, and the concurrent shifts in university economic practices” (16). Taken together, these render the study of MENA in the North American academy a “political landscape” (23), of which this book offers a masterful, if not essential, study. The authors skilfully dispel the idea that an academic discipline is inherently politically disentangled, taking us through a powerful and lively ethnographic journey that is thought-provoking and demands a new kind of self-reflexiveness—one that a discipline so renowned for the art of self-reflection has yet to venture into. Chapters 1–3 carefully chart MENA scholars’ academic trajectories. The authors explore the multitude of reasons that attracted individuals to anthropology, such as their personal motivations to understand “otherness” and a growing interest in “studying one’s own.” The latter was made possible thanks to the rise of feminist and anti-colonial approaches that were challenging discourses of objectivity and encouraged Arab Americans to study their own societies. But perhaps the most resonant attraction to Anthropology is the allure of its tools that are perceived to be exceptionally ethical, namely “being there” through fieldwork that encourages “listening to people on their own terms” (37). These tools seemed particularly appropriate in the context of a heightened involvement of the US in the Middle East and North Africa. Over the years, the Palestinian Intifada, the first Gulf War, and 9/11, all played a huge part in sparking an interest in the anthropology of the region. Anthropology seemed to provide the perfect space to challenge dominant structures of power for a growing number of scholars who expressed their political concern and who saw a need to “speak back to US empire’s effects at home and abroad” (46). The ethnographic accounts that Deeb and Winegar provide illuminate the implications of some of these broader politics on the...

Programming Language Use in US Academia and Industry

In the same way that natural languages influence and shape the way we think, program - ming languages have a profound impact on the way a programmer analyzes a problem and formu- lates its solution in the form of a program. To the extent that a first programming course is likely to determine the student's approach to program design, program analysis, and programming meth- odology, the choice of the programming language used in the first programming course is likely to be very important. In this paper, we report on a recent survey we conducted on programming language use in US academic institutions, and discuss the significance of our data by comparison with programming language use in industry.

American Exceptionalism at the Crossroads: Three Responses

Unlike the immediate post-Cold War era of triumphalism and neoliberal prosperity, the last decade has witnessed the erosion of the ‘unipolar moment’ after the major setbacks of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and the financial crisis of 2008. In this context, reconsidering the idea of American exceptional identity is not simply a scholastic exercise, but an urgent practical problem concerning the direction of US leadership in the world. This article presents a review of three representative discourses on American exceptionalism at a critical juncture. First, the neoconservatives Charles W. Dunn et al. and Robert Kagan attempt to reconfirm the virtue of the ‘American Creed’ and reassure the American people that the US will lead the world as it has done. Second, Tony Smith represents a dominant liberal consensus in US academia. Following Louis Hartz, Smith emphasizes not triumphalism, but an historical irony of American liberal identity. Finally, Anatol Lieven, resonating with the ‘multiple traditions’ approach against the liberal consensus school, suggests a more complex understanding of American exceptionalism by analyzing the existence of the ‘antithesis’ or the Jacksonian tradition.

The Internet Imaginary: Between Technology and Technique

The Internet Imaginary: Between Technology and Technique