US Cultural History Research Articles

Contributors

Sunil Agnani, associate professor in English and history at the University of Illinois Chicago, is the author of a book on Denis Diderot and Edmund Burke, Hating Empire Properly: The Two Indies and Limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism (recipient of the 2014 Harry Levin Prize for Best First Book from the American Comparative Literature Association), which examines the role of ressentiment and revenge in European anticolonial thought of the Enlightenment.Jason Fitzgerald is assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan, where he specializes in theater studies and post-1945 US cultural history. He is currently working on a book about the late 1960s US theatrical avant-garde, with an essay from that project published in Modern Drama. He was formerly the book review editor for Theatre Journal and is an assistant editor at boundary 2.Joshua Lam is assistant professor of English at Michigan State University. His research focuses on race, science, and technology in US literature. His current book project examines racialized automaton figures in the modernist era; a second project focuses on racial objectification in contemporary experimental Black poetry. His essays have appeared in the Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Journal of Modern Literature, College Literature, Callaloo, The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology, and The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-First Century.Robert D. Richardson is the author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (1986), Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995), and William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2006).

Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters by Tobias Boes

Reviewed by: Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters by Tobias Boes Karolina Watroba Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters. By Tobias Boes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. Pp. xx + 354. Cloth $34.95. ISBN 978-1501744990. This book significantly expands the argument sketched out in Tobias Boes's earlier article "Thomas Mann, World Author: Representation and Autonomy in the World Republic of Letters" (2015) and builds on Hans Rudolf Vaget's extensive work on Thomas Mann's American exile, especially the 2011 monograph Thomas Mann, der Amerikaner. Leben und Werk im amerikanischen Exil 1938–1952. It also joins last year's exhibition "Thomas Mann in Amerika" at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach in arguing for a renewed relevance of Thomas Mann in the current political climate. Thomas Mann's War chronicles in great detail Mann's myriad involvements in American and European politics during his exile in the US, providing—in a highly [End Page 411] engaging and readable form—a valuable contextualization of Mann's literary writing and personal life, both of which form the usual focus of academic scholarship on the author. As Boes states in the introduction, his study is neither a biography of Mann, nor a study of his literary production, but rather analyzes Mann's international career from the 1920s until his death in 1955 to reconstruct "forces in US cultural history (for example, the rise of middlebrow publishing in the 1920s, or the Popular Front in the 1930s) that changed the ways in which ordinary Americans thought about the relationship between literature and the world" (13). Drawing on extensive archival research in addition to published material, Boes is able to discuss in this context Mann's political essays and speeches, lecture tours, press conferences, and radio broadcasts, as well as a range of documents that provide insight into Mann's reception and circulation in the US, from newspaper articles and reviews to his publishers' advertising copy. Meanwhile, and in a reversal of the usual hierarchy in studies written by literary scholars, the novels and short stories published during Mann's exile form merely the background to Boes's project. Their insightful but brief discussion takes the form of a series of "interludes" that "can [be] skip[ped] without danger of losing the thread of the narrative" (18). This is a highly interesting approach, not least because Mann's political essays and speeches sold much better in the US than his fiction, a fact that Boes investigates by discussing the rise of the American "Great Books" publishing series and university courses, in which literary texts featured alongside political and even scientific treatises. And yet, Mann's fame in America "rested on the quietly dignified aura of culture and tradition with which he surrounded himself and which seemed to emanate from every page that he wrote" rather than his political writings as such (4). Most instances of Mann's political commentary quoted in the book are rather trite and vague; even Boes himself occasionally concedes that a lot of Mann's political writing of the time might strike us as "rather banal pronouncements" (105). Examples include statements such as "the different spheres of humanity—whether artistic, cultural, or political—are really inseparable" (100); "totality: there is only one, the totality of humanity, of the human" (105); and "the 'political' … is the matter of ultimate values, of the basis of our civilization, of the very idea of humanity" (144). This, coupled with the ineffectiveness of any political action endorsed by Mann—unless, as Boes clearly demonstrates, it happened to coincide with a preexisting political or military agenda—suggests that Mann can hardly be described as a political thinker or commentator, let alone an activist during his American exile, and intimates a rather skeptical take on the problem—central to both Mann and Boes—of the relationship between intellectuals and political action. Perhaps Mann's wartime radio programs broadcasted by the BBC in occupied Germany might form an exception to this narrative, although Boes leaves open the question of the extent of their actual impact on German listeners. [End Page 412] Boes argues that Mann...

American Obscurantism: History and the Visual in U.S. Literature and Film by Peter Lurie

Reviewed by: American Obscurantism: History and the Visual in U.S. Literature and Film by Peter Lurie David Holloway Peter Lurie. American Obscurantism: History and the Visual in U.S. Literature and Film. Oxford UP, 2018. x + 221 pp. In American Obscurantism, Peter Lurie explores “an ongoing and pervasive—but also forceful—strategy of obliquity and indirection” (1) in racially “whitened” (24) accounts of American history—a tradition, he contends, marked by “notable evasions and codings around the facts of racial conflict and its concurrent presence-as-absence in American cultural history” (7). Canonical American texts, Lurie argues, wrestle with the “unsymbolizable dimension” (6) of traumatic racial conflict in acts of representation that yield, at best, “spectral” (17) forms of historical knowledge. This way of knowing the past reveals an “American propensity for visual thinking about social reality” [End Page 786] (2) that is “obscurantist” because of the blindness of its looking and the unintelligibility of the histories it tells. Lurie illustrates this claim with a series of penetrating close readings of texts in which traumatic events—notably around slavery in the South, and Manifest Destiny in the West—that are half glimpsed or poetically implied are then re-repressed or re-encoded, sometimes in highly self-aware ways, in the formal arrangements and thematic foci of canonical literature and film. In the broadest sense, this is not a new argument. Questions about the accessibility and transparency (or otherwise) of history, the occlusion of power, and the presence-as-absence—through their representation in culture—of marginal or subaltern identities, have shaped orthodox approaches to the humanities since at least the theoretical turn of the later twentieth century. Lurie’s work, however, significantly extends this received critical context, not least in its identification of a distinctive, and specifically racialized (white) tradition in US cultural history, a finding that broadens the discussion beyond the localized function of specific genres or representational modes. The Gothic, for example, long seen as a genre in which violent American histories are precariously un/repressed, figures in Lurie’s exegesis, but only as one cultural mode among others to which he ascribes a common evasiveness or indirection. Just as significant is the methodology American Obscurantism brings to bear on the tradition it describes. Lurie fuses key strains of poststructuralist critical theory (Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, and Paul de Man feature prominently in the early stages of the book) with aspects of trauma and affect theory. This approach informs not only his textual analysis but also his sustained interrogation of new historicist methodologies—ways of looking critically, he suggests, that misguidedly equate representation of historical events with the actuality of events themselves, in a “conceit of knowing” (19) that renders critical practice complicit in the obscuring of other historical experience. Beginning with Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket and Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”—positioned here as self-consciously ambiguous investigations of the obscurantism he describes—Lurie jumps forward to William Faulkner’s Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! He then moves to a historicist strain in Faulkner criticism that he suggests has failed to reflect adequately both the non-identity of Southern history with the excessive, dreamlike literariness of Faulkner’s language, and the potent evocation of otherness (and thus the potential for aesthetic negation) embedded within this formal excess. Lurie then jumps forward again, with successive chapters on two classics of late twentieth-century auteur [End Page 787] cinema, Stanley Kubrick’s horror The Shining, and the Coen brothers’ postmodern Gothic Fargo. If these leaps across historical time may appear obtrusive or glib to some readers, it is important to note that they are entirely consistent—formally, as it were—with Lurie’s repudiation of new historicism, helping embed his skepticism about received historicist practice within the structural organization of the book itself, in the commonalities he finds at play in texts written and filmed a century and a half apart. The commonalities themselves are convincing, too, as Lurie traces thematic affinities between Faulkner’s themes of racialized haunting, hidden secrets, and paternal sin and Kubrick’s re-treading of similar ground. The famous scene in The Shining, for example...

Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America by Will Norman

Reviewed by: Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury Americaby Will Norman Ian Afflerbach N orman, W ill. Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America. Hopkins Studies in Modernism, Douglas Mao, Series Editor. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2016. Pp. xii+ 263. Modernist studies and American Studies, remarks Will Norman, "rarely speak to each other" (15). Transatlantic Aliensoffers at once an origin story for this silence, an inventory for what these fields have to talk about, and a dialectical reading practice capable of mediating between the antithetical interpretive categories that constantly risk dividing the institutional and aesthetic history of modernism from the daily, material reality of postwar American culture. By focusing upon a group of European exiles who arrived in the United States and took on "complex engagement[s] with the emergence of a fully fledged mass culture" (2), Norman unsettles the "persistent misconception by which the United States at midcentury functions as modernism's banal other" (2). These transnational émigrés not only lived through, but indeed embodied, the "disorienting and uncanny juxtapositions" (2) constitutive of the 1940s and 1950s, when "reified categories of nation and cultural hierarchy" (2) were still being constructed. This moment, Norman rightly states, "is one of the most complex and least understood in modern US cultural history" (5) whose "radical instability" meant "it was far from clear what constituted a legitimate aesthetic regime and what didn't, whether an American crime novel could be considered high literature or a New Yorkercartoon be considered high art" (5). Norman's book dwells in the "repeated process of entanglement, improvisation, and compromise" (211) through which his transatlantic aliens navigated such tensions. His reading practice draws upon Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the cultural field, which emphasizes how artists and intellectuals must negotiate competing positions in a market for distinction. And yet, to this reader's relief, Norman does not belabour abstract sociological categories, but rather adopts a biographic narrative method that continuously emphasizes how negotiating the cultural field involves "restricted but necessary choices made by individuals in their lives and work" (11). His book provides a refreshingly grounded look at what it means for intellectuals to grapple with mass culture "in those moments when theory is wrenched from the abstract and returned to the historical grounds of everyday alienated life" (48), a process he simply and aptly calls "coping" (48). Norman's first chapter introduces "methodological models" for his book in the unlikely pairing of C.L.R. James and Theodor Adorno (16). James's revolutionary optimism about popular media has made him a heroic figure in American and post-colonial studies, while Adorno's abyssal cynicism about the culture industry has left him "sadly reified" as an elitist defender of European modernism (17). Yet Norman demonstrates how these antithetical positions emerged as reciprocal responses to a shared émigré experience of American mass culture. Norman first traces how [End Page 340]James's early writing was informed by a blend of nineteenth-century cultural criticism and sentimental Hollywood movies. Popular art forms such as film and radio, James came to believe, could channel the "violent desires" of the working class "into revolutionary praxis" (28), and eventually create a unified national culture. After introducing Adorno's far more cynical account of the culture industry, Norman turns to Minima Moralia. Reading this idiosyncratic, pseudo-self-help book in the tradition of the modernist novel, Norman emphasizes how Adorno's writing renders intellectual alienation in post-war American culture through "the fragility and pathos of its own subjectivity, the resolutely ethical underpinning of its insistence on remaining unhomed in America, and the freight of its estranging style" (48). For all their manifest differences, Norman concludes, James and Adorno "were interested more in criticizing the process by which culture was being stratified in the American 1940s than in the policing of the divisions themselves" (32). In this way, Norman maps the dialectical movement of his own book, which sustains an engagement with mass culture poised between undue optimism and bleak alienation, circumscribing the aesthetic and academic categories that typically install midcentury modernism and postwar American culture as antithetical domains. Chapter Two continues this project by repairing...

The Korean War, the Cold War, and the American Novel

From a Cold War literary and cultural studies perspective, the Korean War (1950–1953) is a distinctive moment in US cultural history. This essay proposes that there are two broad phases of Korean War literature: the first phase is work written in the 1950s and early 1960s generally by white, male Americans who fought in the war, reported on the war, or had some other ties to the US military. Work of this phase renders the Korean War in terms of the bipolar global imaginary dictated by the Cold War: even as this imaginary is ultimately unsuitable for capturing the complexities of the war, writers of the first phase understand Korea’s meaning only in terms of US political imperatives. The second phase, marked by Richard E. Kim’s The Martyred (1964) but not gaining traction until the 1980s and 1990s, is work generally written by first- or second-generation Korean Americans who either experienced the war directly or explored the cultural memory of a war that, some scholars have argued, is a precondition of the very idea of Korean Americanness. Work of this phase begins with the premise that the US framing of the Korean War is damaging, and as such is marked by meta-engagements with the Cold War rhetorical frame that shift the meaning of the war away from US claims about it. The category of “Korean War literature” changes how we understand “Cold War literature” and therefore post-1945 American literature and culture.

Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley (1818–1907)

Although Hobbs Keckley made only a single contribution to American women's writing, her significance as a writer and figure in US cultural history should not be underestimated. (1) Her memoir, Behind the Scenes. Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, recounts a childhood and young adulthood in slavery followed by several years as a high-profile dressmaker to the nation's political elite. (2) Her intimate association with Mary Todd Lincoln made her a celebrity, and her chronicle of this relationship earned her notoriety. With this profile, I hope to generate wider scholarly interest in Keckley, first by offering a brief biography and then by suggesting some future critical directions and potential contexts for teaching her memoir. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Hobbs was born circa 1818 in Dinwiddie Court-House, Virginia, to enslaved parents, and her upbringing was marked by family separation and constant physical abuse. (3) When she was in her early twenties Hobbs was relocated to St. Louis, where her owner hired her out as a seamstress. She worked tirelessly to establish a name for herself, noting, best ladies in St. Louis were my patrons, and when my reputation was once established I never lacked for orders. With my needle I kept bread in the mouths of seventeen persons for two years and five months (45). While in St. Louis she met and married James Keckley. Her marriage, however, was short-lived, as Keckley soon realized that her new husband had misrepresented himself as free and, in her words, CC proved dissipated, and a burden instead of a helpmate (50). Fiercely committed to attaining freedom, Keckley raised the necessary funds to purchase herself and her son by borrowing from acquaintances, and upon receiving free papers in 1855 she moved to Washington, DC. She quickly established herself as a seamstress for the city's most influential residents; a regular client was Varina Howell Davis, the wife of Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis. Keckley was particularly eager to work in the White House. She writes, Ever since arriving in Washington I had a great desire to work for the ladies of the White House, and to accomplish this end I was ready to make almost any sacrifice consistent with (76). Eventually, her aspirations were realized, as she secured a position as the personal dressmaker, or for Mary Lincoln (92). (4) In the years immediately before and during the Civil War, Keckley occupied an exceptional role as a White House insider. She virtually lived with the Lincolns on the eve of the war; consoled Mary Lincoln after the death of her son, Willie, and the assassination of her husband; and helped to craft--literally--the iconic image of the Lincolns. Her recollections of these intimate moments make up a substantial portion of Behind the Scenes. Following her husband's assassination, Mary Lincoln found herself in financial straits and sought to sell her husband's personal items as well as several of her dresses. Many saw this decision as a breach of propriety and an affront to her late husband's legacy. The press seized upon the story, which became known as the Old Clothes Scandal. Keckley entered into this fray herself with the publication of Behind the Scenes in 1868. First published by G. W. Carleton, Behind the Scenes is attributed to Elizabeth Keckley, formerly a slave, but more recently a modiste, and friend to Mrs. Abraham Lincoln. This authorial identification, a narrative in itself, exemplifies the self-conscious construction of identity and political acumen that made Keckley such a success. Unlike most slave narratives, which begin by announcing abolitionist motives in the preface, Keckley's offers a strikingly different rationale for authorship: I have been prompted by the purest motive. Mrs. Lincoln, by her own acts, forced herself into notoriety. She stepped beyond the formal lines which hedge about a private life, and invited public criticism. …

The state of the art: leadership training and development: US perspectives: above and beyond recorded history

There are essentially two overlapping approaches to describe the state of the art of school leadership training and development in the US. The first approach is what I call recorded history. It is a factual documentation of milestone events, governance changes as well as the passage of landmark laws and policies. The second approach, hidden histories, emphasises political contingencies, contextual differences, and the many contradictions in meaning and actions that seem to surround events, structures, and policies. This article describes the tensions between these two approaches and then highlights how US cultural history, policy levers, and exemplary leadership research and pedagogies contribute to the current and future state of affairs in school leadership preparation, training, and development in the US.

The Postcolonial Mainstream

In a review essay for this journal back in 2004, Malini Johar Schueller declared “that the suitability of postcolonial theory to the study of US culture should no longer be a subject of debate” (162). Arguing that “the period of critical isolationism and exceptionalism in American studies is over” (173), Schueller suggested how “the emergent field of postcolonial American studies” (164) was demonstrating “how US cultural history has always been a contradictory set of narratives with an endless entanglement of imperial and colonial experiences, and native resistances” (171). As she observed, the conceptual lines of battle in this theoretical debate were clear enough, with critics who wished to place more emphasis on American engagement with colonial issues—Peter Hulme, Edward Watts, and others—being countered by those who clung in some form to the old tenets of US exceptionalism, whose ethos of republican freedom claimed a special exemption for the nation from imperialist models. This dynamic was complicated by what Jeanne Boydston has described recently as the “doggedly antitheoretical” mindset of many early American cultural historians, who, even when dealing specifically with the colonial period, “still grumble that postcolonial methods offer little more than an esoteric vocabulary and tortured syntax” (1223). No academic method can ever be a universal panacea, of course, but the task now, six years after Schueller’s review essay, is not so much to justify the idea of postcolonial American studies in abstract terms but, rather, to consider what difference such an approach has made, and might make in the future, to the broader Americanist field. As this theoretical strategy has become more academically mainstream, both the risks and the benefits associated with the rotation of American literary scholarship on a postcolonial axis have come more clearly into view.

Letter to the Editor

In response to the letter from Styra Avins (Tempo, January 2003), I am grateful to stand so fascinatingly corrected with regard to the (poorly documented?) aspect of US cultural history in question.

What is so bad about being rich? The representation of wealth in American culture

Today, the USA is the Western nation with the greatest percentage of the world's rich and with the greatest gap between rich and poor. However, there is hardly any national debate or outcry about this growth of wealth polarization. From a Cultural Studies perspective, this puzzling absence of protest raises the question whether and in what way culture plays a role in shaping US attitudes toward economic and social inequality. This article traces these changing attitudes by focusing on cultural representations of wealth in four different stages of US cultural history: the 'Protestant ethic', 'robber barons', 'conspicuous consumption' and the recent 'greed' periods. The article concludes by discussing the conflicting attitudes currently at work in the perception and representation of wealth in US culture.

The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century et al.

As garment workers, longshoremen, autoworkers, sharecroppers and clerks took to the streets, striking and organizing unions in the midst of the Depression, artists, writers and filmmakers joined the insurgent social movement by creating a cultural front. Disney cartoonists walked picket lines, and Billie Holiday sand 'Strange Fruit' at the left-wing cabaret, Cafe Society. Duke Ellington produced a radical musical, Jump for Joy, New York garment workers staged the legendary Broadway revue Pins and Needles, and Orson Welles and his Mercury players took their labor operas and anti-fascist Shakespeare to Hollywood and made Citizen Kane. A major reassessment of US cultural history, The Cultural Front is a vivid mural of this extraordinary upheaval which reshaped American culture in the twentieth century.

The cultural front: the laboring of American culture in the twentieth century

As garment workers, longshoremen, autoworkers, sharecroppers and clerks took to the streets, striking and organizing unions in the midst of the Depression, artists, writers and filmmakers joined the insurgent social movement by creating a cultural front. Disney cartoonists walked picket lines, and Billie Holiday sand 'Strange Fruit' at the left-wing cabaret, Cafe Society. Duke Ellington produced a radical musical, Jump for Joy, New York garment workers staged the legendary Broadway revue Pins and Needles, and Orson Welles and his Mercury players took their labor operas and anti-fascist Shakespeare to Hollywood and made Citizen Kane. A major reassessment of US cultural history, The Cultural Front is a vivid mural of this extraordinary upheaval which reshaped American culture in the twentieth century.