US Culture Research Articles

The Representational Necropolitics of Black Women in Zombie Dystopia Video Games

Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 147 Eric Andrew James The Representational Necropolitics of Black Women in Zombie Dystopia Video Games Though Stuart Hall defends popular representation as an important terrain of political struggle, he also argues that images of difference are dominated by “racialized regimes of representation” manifest in stereotypes and invisibilities.1 These ensure that marginal identities are reduced, essentialized, and rendered other. One of the most powerful tools for this form of silencing in the popular representation repertoire is the notion of an established genre. In US popular culture, creators and critics alike often position people who experience multiple layers of oppression as constitutively outside the expectations of existing genres. Their absence is attributable not simply to creator racism but also to that genre’s relationships to intersecting categories of difference and domination, such as race and gender. Beginning with the preponderance of representational violence in popular media, this article draws from existing work by feminists of color in order to model a critique of US representational precarity. To illustrate the political tensions in popular US culture, I stage my intervention into a medium whose industry has had particularly fraught struggles with representation: video gaming. There, I focus specifically on 1. Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the Other,” in Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader, ed. Margaret Wetherell, Stephanie Taylor, and Simeon J. Yates. (London: Sage, 2001), 325–44. 148 Eric Andrew James recent attempts to represent Black women, whom the gaming industry has held up as emblematic of difference and diversity. 2 These attempts are marred by predictable disasters and pitfalls. In particular, I discuss how the representational politics of Black women in popular zombie dystopia games repeats a similar violence as the previous silencing of Black women in these spaces. The gaming industry’s struggles with representation in the wake of Gamergate are demonstrative of broader tensions in Black women’s representation in popular media. Thus, while I am focused on video games, I also intend this analysis to reflect on feminist studies of the relationship between genre and representation. I advance existing scholarship on video game representations of Blackness by theorizing violence enacted at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in game genres. Specifically, I position this intervention as a point of departure from TreaAndrea M. Russworm’s chapter in Gaming Representation: “Dystopian Blackness and the Limits of Racial Empathy in The Walking Dead and The Last of Us.”3 This chapter provides a compelling critique of the relationship between the dystopian game genre and Black representation, highlighting the lack of self-reflexivity in mass-market representations of Blackness. Expanding this project by taking another look at her objects of study—The Last of Us (2013– 2014) and Telltale’s The Walking Dead (2012)—I argue that taking Black women’s multiple jeopardy as foundational to the zombie dystopia genre offers a deeper look at the grammars of representational violence. My use of multiple jeopardy refers to Deborah K. King’s theorization of how multiple layers of oppression exponentially multiply individual disadvantages. As King describes, “The modifier ‘multiple’ refers not only to several, simultaneous oppressions but to the multiplicative 2. AnnaMaria Jackson-Phelps, “Representation Matters: Positive Portrayals of Black Women in Video Games,” Medium, February 28, 2017, https:// medium.com/legendary-women/representation-matters-positive-portrayals -of-black-women-in-video-games-c96cf9f66fdf; Jef Rouner, “Would You Believe There Have Been Only 14 Playable Black Women in Gaming?” Houston Press, June 5, 2015, https://www.houstonpress.com/arts/would-you-believethere -have-been-only-14-playable-black-women-in-gaming-7484017. 3. TreaAndrea M. Russworm, “Dystopian Blackness and the Limits of Racial Empathy in The Walking Dead and The Last of Us,” Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games, ed. Jennifer Malkowski and TreaAndrea M. Russworm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 109–28. Eric Andrew James 149 relationships among them as well.”4 These layers of oppression are often contradictory and may leave no avenues for action; the expectations placed on one for their race become impossible to fulfill because of the contradictory expectations placed on them for their gender or sexuality. This multiple jeopardy thus introduces...

Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture by Julie Olin-Ammentorp

Reviewed by: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture by Julie Olin-Ammentorp Lingfeng Nie Julie Olin-Ammentorp. Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture. U of Nebraska P, 2019. iix + 386 pp. Edith Wharton and Willa Cather have traditionally been separated and contrasted, with the former labeled an “eastern aristocrat” and the latter a “western democrat” (31). Critics and scholars generally assume that their vast biographical differences, such as social class and geographical location, lead to an unbridgeable gap between their literary creations, including their characters, settings, and themes. Nevertheless, beneath the surface of the split, or even rivalry, between Wharton and Cather lie deep similarities and continuities, as Julie Olin-Ammentorp argues in her fascinating new book, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture. Adopting the tool of place, specifically the typology of physical, cultural, and psychological places developed by anthropologists Pamela Stewart and Andrew Strathern, Olin-Ammentorp’s monograph attempts to illustrate how the lives and works of Wharton and Cather intersect and interact. Olin-Ammentorp splits her study into two parts, which are further divided into six thematic chapters. Part 1, “Contexts and Intersections,” [End Page 602] consists of two chapters and is an exploration of the two novelists’ affinities, ranging from their “lives, interests, and careers” to “their understanding of literature and their experience of place” (17). After drawing a general picture of their common ground, in part 2, “The Place of Culture,” Olin-Ammentorp devotes three chapters to a more nuanced and detailed analysis of specific places, such as New York City, the American West, and France, together with their cultural connotations, to further delve into the two authors’ commonalities, in spite of their differences. Wharton and Cather held contrary views of New York City due to their distinct formative experiences. However, their lives in New York intersected, and their works associated with the city, such as Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth and A Son at the Front and Cather’s stories, “Paul’s Case” and “Coming, Aphrodite!” suggest their parallel fear of US culture’s privileging of money over beauty and materialism over art. They harbored differing attitudes toward the West as well—Wharton was more cynical, while Cather was more positive. Accordingly, the two presented opposite Wests in their works: Wharton’s West was vague and uncultivated; Cather’s, specific and energetic. Nevertheless, according to Olin-Ammentorp, they shared an admiration of Western vitality and faced similar challenges related to gender when describing the West, as it was supposedly a metaphor of masculinity and power and thus not a domain for women writers. Although the two authors had different personal experiences with France, their admiration of French culture—its integration of “business, practicality, and energy . . . beauty and art” (206)—resonated, and both Wharton and Cather considered it an example for the US to emulate, particularly materialistic New York and the vigorous West. Shifting the focus away from specific places, the last chapter first attends to Wharton’s and Cather’s experiences with traveling and settlement, and their corresponding and paradoxical sentiments of having a “love of travel” (264) and a “fear of rootlessness or homelessness,” which are both evident in their works. Then, the chapter circles back to an imagination of a hypothetical meeting between the two fiction writers, as pointed out in chapter 1. By presenting Wharton and Cather’s profound connections and proximities, both biographical and literary, this study deconstructs our common understanding of vast distance between the two great novelists and destabilizes the factitious divisions between them—Eastern and Western, aristocratic and populist, and French and American—demonstrating the constructedness of their identity and the interconnectedness of national literatures. In this sense, Olin-Ammentorp obliquely answers the questions about American [End Page 603] literature put forward at the very beginning of the book: “What, after all, makes an American author American, and in what sense are Wharton and Cather, different as they are perceived to be, both American? Is the part of the country we think of as the ‘West’ somehow more ‘American’ than the region we think of as the ‘East’? What are the deep connections between American and other...

American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century by Ido Hartogsohn

Reviewed by: American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century by Ido Hartogsohn Devin Lander (bio) American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century By Ido Hartogsohn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020. 432 pages, 6" x 9". $35.00 paper, $35.00 ebook. Ido Hartogsohn, assistant professor in the program for science, technology, and society at Bar Ilan University, has produced an expansive and well-documented historical overview of the cultural effects of psychedelic substances on the American society of the twentieth century. Hartogsohn's particular focus is on the concept of "set and setting" and how this theory relates both to the individual psychedelic experience and to the larger zeitgeist of mid-twentieth-century US culture. Hartogsohn defines the theory of set and setting as arguing that "psychedelic experiences are shaped, first and foremost, by the mind-set of an individual entering a psychedelic experience (set) and by the environment in which the experience takes place (setting)" and expands on this more clinical definition by concluding that "the character and content of a psychedelic experience … is not solely, or even predominately, determined by the drug itself" and is instead "primarily dictated by the personality, expectation, and intention (set), and the physical environment in which the experience takes place, including the people in the immediate vicinity and the broader sociocultural context (setting)" (1). It is on this broader sociocultural context that Hartogsohn stakes much of his argument. Hartogsohn's main thesis is that the reasons psychedelic substances became a major [End Page 422] cultural force in mid-twentieth-century America (and beyond) were as much a result of the collective sociocultural aspects of that particular time and place as the individual experiences created by psychedelics themselves. As such, Hartogsohn suggests that the "American Trip" referred to in the book's title is a "unique, culture-and time-dependent understanding and enactment of the psychedelic experience that emerged in mid-twentieth century America" (3–4). Illuminating on this theme by focusing on the research that began in earnest in the 1950s and reached a cultural pinnacle in the 1960s, Hartogsohn concludes that the "set and setting" of this particular era informed the conceptualization of what exactly a psychedelic experience is, or should be, and that this conceptualization exists to this day despite the fact that the time and place has changed. As a result, Hartogsohn notes that "Different societies at different points in history would have created different set and setting conditions, which would have shaped the character of the LSD (psychedelic) experience in entirely different ways" (208).1 In outlining this important and expansive theory, Hartogsohn organizes the book into ten chapters. In these chapters he traces the evolution of psychedelic research from the late 1940s through the 1960s and beyond by following five prominent psychedelic researchers and seven different, but at times overlapping, theories that existed as to what psychedelics were and how they could be used. The five researchers include German-born psychiatrist Max Rinkel, who was the first doctor in North America to work with LSD; Sidney Cohen, a psychiatrist at the UCLA School of Medicine who conducted experiments with a variety of substances, including LSD; Betty Eisner, a psychologist who worked with Cohen and went on to develop her own theories related to psychedelics; Timothy Leary, the psychologist and former Harvard faculty member who became the most visible advocate of the positive benefits of psychedelic use; and Myron Stolaroff, a former electrical engineer who helped introduce psychedelics to technological innovators in Silicon Valley. The seven theories and uses for psychedelics are woven throughout the book. Hartogsohn focuses them through the work of the five researchers, as well as other entities. Max Rinkel, for example, was an early proponent of psychotomimetic research, which was the theory that psychedelics mimicked psychosis and could be a useful way for researchers to learn more about that type of mental illness. Sidney Cohen, alternatively, was a prominent early supporter of using psychedelics as part of psychotherapy, while Betty Eisner would focus more on spirituality and Myron Stolaroff on the potential uses of psychedelics for creativity and innovation. Leary, meanwhile, quickly moved from the...

Becoming White Again: The Bildungsroman, Whiteness, and the Culture of Poverty

Becoming White AgainThe Bildungsroman, Whiteness, and the Culture of Poverty Christian Ravela (bio) "When white poverty becomes politically salient it is clear that historical consciousness is at stake" —Tiffany Willoughby-Herard On March 2, 2017, the notorious policy entrepreneur Charles Murray gave a talk at Middlebury College. His presentation stirred much controversy, leading to a massive student protest that halted the event and ended with injuries. On August 7, 2017, NPR's Fresh Air featured an interview with J. D. Vance to discuss Hillbilly Elegy, his New York Times best-selling memoir about his life in Ohio, growing up with those he affectionately called "hillbillies." Both events index the mainstream interest and dialogue on the now mythic "white working class" prior to and in the wake of Donald Trump's election. Concern over this white working class has become ubiquitous, ranging from the public prominence of economists Ann Case and Angus Deaton's 2015 study (2015) of the growing number of "deaths of despair" among middle-aged, working-class white men to academic monographs like Arlie Hochschild's Stranger in Their Own Land and Nancy Isenberg's White Trash, to countless cover stories on the opiate/heroin crisis in magazines like Time and The New Yorker, to popular films like I, Tonya (2017) and Ladybird (2017), to the television reboot of Roseanne (2018), and even to the immensely popular podcast S-Town (2017). Indeed, Hillbilly Elegy is being adapted by Ron Howard into a film for Netflix in 2020. If all sectors and mediums of US culture have been probing the questions about who this white working class is and what its problems may be, then what is particularly interesting about Murray and Vance [End Page 181] is the extent to which they answer these questions with the pernicious call to a culture of poverty.1 Murray's bona fides on the matter need little explanation. He is best known for co-writing The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life with Richard J. Herrnstein. The book garnered much controversy as sections of it linked racial inequality to intelligence.2 He later wrote Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, in which he identified a growing culture of poverty in white working-class communities resulting from increased US class divisions. Vance's credentials on the matter are far less well known, but, as Elizabeth Catte noted, his memoir is suffused with the idea, going so far as to cite Murray approvingly.3 Indeed, Murray and Vance spoke together on the problem of the white working class at an event held by the American Enterprise Institute. How is it, then, that Charles Murray aroused such instant ire from liberals and leftists alike while J. D. Vance gets invited to speak in liberal forums like Fresh Air and TED talks? How is it that their promulgation of the culture of poverty can receive such widely different receptions, at once roundly rejected as racist and lauded as thoughtful and earnest? Of course, it is not entirely the case that Vance has been completely accepted as an unproblematic figure. As I will discuss later on, he was met with protests by activists during his panel at the 2018 Appalachian Studies Association annual meeting. Such an event challenges the easy explanation of Vance's rise and national reception as a simple matter of novelty (as opposed to Murray's long and infamous history in the US public sphere); instead, it pushes these questions toward considerations of the cultural politics of race, region, and nation.4 This essay pursues these questions and issues by examining perhaps an unlikely source—J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy (Elegy) itself. Specifically, I argue that Elegy's narrative form comes to naturalize Vance's white-culture-of-poverty thesis for liberal audiences. Hillbilly Elegy is a quintessential bildungsroman.5 It follows J.D.'s development from an anger-filled and hopelessly lost child to a self-sufficient but psychically damaged adult through his movement in and out of Middletown, Ohio.6 In so doing, Elegy establishes and normalizes a white culture of poverty as both the catalyst for J.D.'s moral development and the...

“I See Why They Play”: Chinese immigrant parents and their beliefs about young children's play

Parents’ beliefs have an important influence on their children's play and learning experiences in the home and at school. Given the dramatic increase in the number of Chinese immigrant families and children living in the United States (the population has grown more than six-fold since 1980, reaching 2.3 million in 2019), it is particularly important to gain a better understanding of these immigrant parents’ beliefs. Their beliefs about their children's education most likely vary greatly based on numerous factors including their cultural backgrounds, and these beliefs have been shown to be correlated with children's social and developmental outcomes. The present study aim was twofold: first, to examine play beliefs among this rapidly growing group by validating an existing parent report measure of play beliefs and comparing parents’ beliefs to children's interactive peer play and social skills in Head Start classrooms; second, to provide more nuanced information via qualitative data analysis about how Chinese immigrant parents make meaning of their children's play in the context of early learning opportunities. Families of 213 preschool children enrolled in Head Start programs located in a large, northeastern city participated in this study. Findings extend the validity of the Parent Play Beliefs Scale (PPBS; Fogle & Mendez, 2006) for use with Chinese immigrants in the US. Qualitative data suggest that Chinese immigrant parents hold positive beliefs about play, while also displaying some concerns about preschool curriculum in the United States, which likely derive from their own learning experiences when they were in China. The current study underscores the importance of incorporating immigrant parents’ voices in assessments of children's behavior to better reflect cultural nuance and variability, parenting strategies, and/or beliefs that may differ from mainstream US culture.

Leaky Masculinities, Porous Nations, Queercrip Affiliations

Vulnerable Constitutions draws together queer studies and feminist disability studies to produce new visions of queercrip masculinity in twentieth-century US literature and culture. Introducing the concept of "antiprophylactic citizenship," this monograph redefines the contours of masculinity not as invulnerability, but as radical openness, revealing the transformative properties of leaky boundaries in terms of the body as well as the nation-state. Barounis's meditations on immunity, masculinity, and the viral speak presciently to a world altered by pandemics and mass debility.

Modern Dance As an American Alternative to Classical Ballet

the article analyzes the features of the American modern dance, which formed in the first half of the 20th century as an alternative to the classical ballet of the United States, which had Russian roots. In the article there were formulated both the artistic and aesthetic principles of modern dance and the historical and cultural prerequisites for the formation of the US national choreographic school. The work uses theoretical methods: visual and text analysis of choreographic works and music for performances, comparison of the means of plastic expressiveness, movements and figures of classical ballet and modern dance, the principles of stage development of artistic images of performances. The basis of the empirical study was a generalization of the practical experience of staging performances by leading American dancers of the 20th century. According to the results of the study, it is noted that the features of modern dance are opposite to the classical ballet of the United States, testify to the desire of Americans to illuminate the problems of modern time and convey the unique national features of US culture, using elements of African or Indian dances, as well as movements that are not characteristic of classical ballet, but reflect the spirit of our time. The materials of the article have theoretical and practical value for specialists dealing with the problems of culture and art of the 20th century, including modern choreography

Wheat: a powerful crop in US-American culture: Between politics andplant agency

Intertwined in processes of ideological meaning-making, wheat has been particularly successful in pairing its genetic assets with a powerful symbolic charge in US-American culture. The sense of agency that US culture attaches to wheat is subsumed under paradigms of organized personhood such as the nation and the corporation. Artists and writers have merged the idea of “wheat power” with the fears and hopes of their specific historical moment.Wheat is not only genetically complex but has also been exceptionally culturally defined. Interestingly, some cultural representations of wheat emphasize what may be referred to asplant agency. This is particularly striking in North American art and literature. There is often a certain wildness, independence, and power to wheat that are lacking in other cultivated crops. Focusing on the 19thand early 20thcenturies, this article examines the active role of wheat in shaping US-American history and society. Starting from the assumption that cultural artefacts help societies to understand and negotiate their norms and values, I take a look at a painting (Emanuel Leutze’sMrs. Schuyler Burning Her Wheat Fields on the Approach of the Britishfrom 1852) and a novel (Frank Norris’sThe Octopusfrom 1901) to analyze their representation of the human-wheat relationship. Using a historicizing, philological approach, this case study contributes to a debate in the environmental humanities that seeks to redefine the human-crop relationship in times of climate change, diminishing biodiversity, and human population growth. Can the American legacy of wheat help us to reframe the human-wheat relationship? Are there potential pitfalls of crop agency as it is depicted in American representations of wheat?

Shared values or shared interests? Arab publics and intervention in Syria

Analysing Arab public opinion on the international community’s response to the Syrian crisis, we expand existing scholarship by injecting a non-Western perspective into the oftentimes Western-centric debates on intervention. We demonstrate that publics in two prominent Arab Spring countries were quite willing to embrace intervention in Syria in order to depose Bashar al-Assad. More specifically, our analysis reveals that both interests and values shape support for different types of international intervention in Syria. In the context of the distinction between policy-driven and culture-driven anti-Americanisms, we show that Egyptian and Tunisian evaluations of US foreign policy behaviour and, to lesser extent, US culture correlate with support for Western-led intervention in Syria.

The Black Lives Matter Movement: A Call to Action for Couple and Family Therapists.

The frequent police killings during the COVID-19 pandemic forced a reckoning among Americans from all backgrounds and propelled the Black Lives Matter movement into a global force. This manuscript addresses major issues to aid practitioners in the effective treatment of African Americans via the lens of Critical Race Theory and the Bioecological Model. We place the impacts of racism on Black families in historical context and outline the sources of Black family resilience. We critique structural racism embedded in all aspects of psychology and allied fields. We provide an overview of racial socialization and related issues affecting the parenting decisions in Black families, as well as a detailed overview of impacts of structural racism on couple dynamics. Recommendations are made for engaging racial issues in therapy, providing emotional support and validation to couples and families experiencing discrimination and racial trauma, and using Black cultural strengths as therapeutic resources.

Panelling without walls: Narrating the border in Barrier

Brian K. Vaughan’s and Marcos Martin’s science fiction comics series, Barrier (2015–18), is a five-issue story set on the US-Mexican border and contributing to the continuing public discourse surrounding undocumented immigration in the United States. First appearing as a webcomic on Vaughan’s Panel Syndicate website and later published in comic book form by Image Comics, Barrier’s story of two characters, a Honduran refugee and a Texas rancher who struggle with and eventually come to rely on one another, depicts linguistic and cultural boundaries and borders, as well as the frustration and hostility they can generate. As comics, Barrier’s very medium works by means of crossing boundaries and borders: binaries (like word and image) are complicated if not subverted, and the borders of each panel remain closed yet open for sequential art to function as a medium for narrative. Moreover, as a bilingual webcomic crossing into print yet all but encouraging an ongoing virtual engagement through web searches and Google Translate, the series demands further creative energy from the reader in reimaging various barriers, borders and positions of liminality. Although stories that represent various kinds of borders (social, cultural and geopolitical) and various ways of establishing, challenging, crossing or deconstructing borders are frequently found in graphic narratives, Barrier demonstrates the south-west border to be one the medium of comics is especially suited to explore. Barrier is a work that takes as its very subject, to borrow a phrase from Ramzi Fawaz, ‘spatially drawn analogies’ in order to engage graphically matters of genuine political import. In doing so, Barrier not only reflects obliquely on its own form, but also engages creatively with one of the most politically and culturally contested spaces in contemporary US culture.

From the Editor's Gable

From the Editor's Gable

Learning from invention failure among research organizations: the role of top management team founding experiences and exposure to US culture

ABSTRACT Building on organisational failure learning and upper echelons theory, we examine the link between top management team (TMT) prior experiences and invention failure learning among research organisations. Specifically, we develop theoretical arguments to suggest that TMT founding experience and exposure to US culture facilitate organisational learning from failure. We test our theoretical reasoning using a longitudinal data set comprising 550 organisation-year observations of the patenting activities conducted by 39 research institutes in Germany. In support of our theoretical arguments, we find that TMT founding experience and TMT exposure to US culture positively moderate the link between prior invention failure and subsequent invention performance. Pointing to TMT experiences as a crucial contingency for whether organisations learn from failure, the present study contributes to the literature on organisational failure learning and upper echelons.

Nathan for You and the New Sincerity aesthetic

ABSTRACT This article argues that Comedy Central’s Nathan For You enacts a sophisticated critique of reality television and offers a different way of capturing ‘reality’ on the small screen. By exaggerating the format’s countless constraints, Nathan for You discovers a way to create real and moving drama from reality television conventions. Using examples taken from across the series, the article argues that the show exemplifies the New Sincerity aesthetic that scholars in numerous other fields have found across contemporary US culture. What Fielder’s project ultimately reveals is that the most exaggerated and grotesque forms of reality-television manipulation can paradoxically open up spaces of sincere communication and feeling. The article also explores many of the formal and stylistic devices that Fielder uses across the series, building a case for a reevaluation of the series.

David Henry Hwang’s Post-Racial Aesthetics in Late Capitalism: A Transversal Butterfly with Prosthetic Agency in M. Butterfly

This paper examines how Butterfly functions as a prosthetic prop to ramp up the affective capacities of both Asian and white subjects to become creolized in the late-capitalist US culture in David H. Hwang’s M. Butterfly. Hwang’s interpretation of Butterfly is invested in casting off entrenched Orientalist discourses all too prevalent in the United States history. However, despite considerable scholarly attention directed to the play, less focus has been paid to the character trajectories concerning how the performative ontology of their race, gender, and sexuality are both effected and affected by the different settings of time and space in it. This new historicist approach helps situate the play within the larger question of Asian American representation in the Cold War context and its related political economy during the second half of the 20th century, a point that this paper investigates through Marc and Renee who reify the libidinal economy of capitalist biopower and an anti-authoritarian precursor of neoliberal capitalism, respectively. Thus, this study shows how Butterfly is teased out as something creolized at the intersections of the different shifting identities of race, gender, and sexuality—a prosthetic prop to enable the “misfit” subjects to claim agency beyond their ontological limits against the American regime of heteronormativity and white supremacy. The embodiment of Butterfly as transversal and creolized serves to materialize Hwang’s aspirations to create an affective model of the American identity, not hyphenated, but more representative of what the US is becoming in terms of post-racial aesthetics.

Norman Mailer and American Totalitarianism in the 1960s

This article investigates Norman Mailer's appropriation and Americanization of the concept of totalitarianism as an internal critique of US society and culture in the 1960s. Dominant understandings of totalitarianism from the 1930s to the 1950s focused on external threats and were wedded to notions of pervasive state control of all aspects of life. Mailer's crucial intervention offered an alternative theory which viewed totalitarianism as an internal threat to the United States and de-emphasized the centrality of the state. His theory of cultural totalitarianism focused on internal psychological manipulation rather than external political coercion. Mailer's focus on the United States was symptomatic of a broader intellectual trend towards the study of non-statist forms of totalitarianism which has yet to receive adequate scholarly attention. This article thus illuminates new dimensions of the totalitarianism debate in American political thought and provides a fuller picture of Mailer's significance as a social critic.

On Ceplair and Trumbo's Dalton Trumbo and Doherty's Show Trial

On Ceplair and Trumbo's Dalton Trumbo and Doherty's Show Trial Shaun Cullen Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical. By Larry Ceplair and Christopher Trumbo. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015. 716 pp., ISBN 978-0-8131-6973-6 (pb), $29.95 Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist. By Thomas Doherty. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 424 pp., ISBN 978-0-231-18778-7 (hc), $28.99 In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, two political ideologies, once thought extinct in the United States, have proven themselves to have just been dormant. On one hand, as reported in the Washington Post, recent Pew and Harvard University polls have found young Americans (between eighteen and twenty-nine years old) to be more receptive to the political ideal of socialism than older generations, the latter of whom were certainly discouraged by what scholars call the "containment ideology" of the Cold War.1 On the other hand, neofascist ideology and its constituent planks of antisemitism, racism, and sexism, have recently asserted themselves in U.S. public life in a manner unfamiliar since the darkest days of Jim Crow or the anti-immigrant 1920s. In other words, since the postcommunist thaw, at least [End Page 239] in the United States, liberal capitalist ideology has not been as triumphant as postmodernists predicted in the early 1990s. In this context, the arrival of two recent books on the Cold War atmosphere of dissent and reaction are timely. The first is a lengthy biography of blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, titled Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical, which was written by Trumbo's son Christopher and film historian Larry Ceplair. (Ceplair has written extensively on the blacklist and Hollywood Marxism elsewhere.) The other is a shorter and in many ways brisker account of the congressional hearings that led to the founding of the blacklist, Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist, by Thomas Doherty. Despite their many differences, these books remind readers of the extraordinary measures taken by US politicians in the Cold War to render "socialism" (democratic and otherwise) a dirty word, and they elucidate the important role that Hollywood (as metonymy for US culture industry in general) played in this ideological process, a process that is probably misunderstood or overlooked by the third of young Americans who now say they are supportive of socialist values, not to mention their neofascist peers. Ceplair and Trumbo's biography of Dalton Trumbo, part of the University Press of Kentucky's Screen Classics series, is as exhaustive an account of the great screenwriter's life as one might imagine reading. Over 700 pages, it is the longest book in the Screen Classics series, twice the length of many other entries, including texts on subjects whose work film fans would probably consider more significant, such as Jack Nicholson or Alfred Hitchcock. Nevertheless, the book is compelling reading and makes a strong case, implicitly, for more academic attention on screenwriters as part of cinematic history and analysis. Indeed, the contributions of a figure like Trumbo and many other screenwriters were largely written out of history, in part because of their very political persecution, a result of Hollywood's complicity with right-wing reactionaries in Washington and elsewhere to stifle dissent during the Cold War era, not to mention the latter's antisemitism, a recurring theme in both texts discussed here. Trumbo's co-written biography narrates all phases of the subject's life, from his birth in Colorado in 1905 and sometimes tempestuous childhood and young adulthood in Colorado Springs and Los Angeles, to his career as a novelist and screenwriter, to his death from a heart attack, after a bout with cancer, in 1976. Unsurprisingly, the book focuses most on Trumbo's political activism, which began in the 1930s and infamously resulted in his being held in contempt of the [End Page 240] Congress in 1947, after his refusal—with ten other Hollywood figures, mostly writers and mostly Jewish—to testify before a pre–Joseph McCarthy House Un-American Activities Committee about their membership in the Communist Party. As is the case in the...

The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis by Melissa J. Homestead

Reviewed by: The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis by Melissa J. Homestead Kelsey Squire The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis. By Melissa J. Homestead. Oxford UP, 2021. 408 pp. Biographical approaches to literature rely so often on facts drawn from archival materials—letters, photographs, birth certificates, ticket stubs—that it can be easy to overlook the role that interpretation plays in biographical studies of authors and their works. Which facts are valued? What evidence is dismissed as unimportant? In The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis, author Melissa J. Homestead addresses one of the largest interpretive gaps in Willa Cather studies: Cather's relationship with longtime partner, Edith Lewis. The Only Wonderful Things provides admirers of Cather's fiction with a deeper, more nuanced understanding of Cather's life and work. More broadly, The Only Wonderful Things will be useful to scholars whose work intersects with the fields of biography, authorship, LBGTQ studies, and early twentieth-century US literature and culture. In her personal and compelling introduction, Homestead outlines how the role of Edith Lewis came to be minimized—and in some cases, erased—in the study of Cather's work. As Homestead explains, "[t]he image of Willa Cather as an autonomous artist, detached from the market and from the contemporary [End Page 131] social world, has made it difficult for Cather biographers and critics to see Edith Lewis"; and Homestead admits that she herself as a younger scholar "fell into the trap of not seeing [Lewis] or of misperceiving what I saw" (3). Questions like "was Cather really a lesbian?" and "were Cather and Lewis friends, coworkers, or lovers?" have haunted biographical studies of Cather's life and work. Homestead summarizes how scholars like Phyllis Robinson and Sharon O'Brien first began to identify Cather as a lesbian in the 1980s. Homestead goes on to discuss how critics misinterpreted evidence at the Cather-Lewis gravesite in Jaffrey, New Hampshire—including rumors that Lewis was buried at Cather's feet—and how these errors minimized Lewis's role in Cather's life. Homestead also draws on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Christopher Nealon, and Heather Love to explore claims that Cather and Lewis were closeted and that they kept their relationship a secret. Is it appropriate to label Cather and Lewis's relationship as lesbian, then? Homestead argues, convincingly, for this label. Drawing on the scholarship of historian Lillian Faderman, Homestead encourages readers to distinguish "lesbian" as an adjective from lesbian as a noun, arguing that this manner of speaking best describes Cather and Lewis's relationship (7). Homestead provides a persuasive model for how to think through historical changes of language that defined same-sex relationships from those of the late nineteenth century to our contemporary moment. While the "Cather as lesbian" question may have dominated popular public narratives of Cather, Homestead's other label for the Cather-Lewis relationship—"creative partnership"—is equally important. While The Only Wonderful Things draws on biographical approaches to literature, it is not, as Homestead clarifies, a full biography of either Willa Cather or Edith Lewis. Homestead explains her organization thusly: "I present a series of scenes from their partnership in chapters organized both chronologically and thematically" (2). This thematic organization runs the risk of being confusing to readers (jumps in the timeline need to be tracked carefully), but through Homestead's deft handling, the thematic organization allows her more expansive leeway in providing cohesive portraits of Cather and Lewis's lives across time. Chapter 1 provides essential details about Edith Lewis's life and family history, starting with her birth in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1881. By [End Page 132] describing the lives of Lewis's parents, Henry and Lillie Lewis, Homestead provides a nuanced portrait of middle-class life in the late nineteenth-century Midwest. In particular, Homestead traces how Henry and Lillie Lewis "recreated or created New England-based social networks in the West" through their professional and personal lives (19). Homestead also presents a detailed discussion of Edith Lewis's writerly inclinations by discussing the stories and sketches...

Commentary on Niederdeppe et al. : Alcohol marketing exposure regulation should apply to all.

Adults need to be better informed about their alcohol marketing exposure and risks of drinking, and be protected from the marketing of harmful products so they can make informed decisions and support the protection of future generations from these same marketing practices. Niederdeppe et al. [1] introduce new analytical methods that allow data for adults to be added to the existing literature on how marketing exposure affects underage alcohol consumption. This complements other efforts made internationally and opens a path for research in further countries into adult drinking and marketing exposure. The vast marketing of alcohol described on television alone in a short time period was impressive. The general public is probably unaware of the volume of advertisement they are exposed to, and more efforts should be made to inform and educate them about how marketing in general and alcohol marketing in particular can shape their lives, choices, attitudes, and social norms [2]. Support for regulatory controls would then, hopefully, increase [3]. Marketing during sports programs is of particular interest. Sports are a significant part of the US culture and a way to socialize, within the family and community. Soccer, football, ice hockey, and basketball are all heavily sponsored by beer companies, and beer advertisements are shown frequently on television during each sport's season in the United States and globally. Watching sport is a period of shared entertainment, but it also risks exposing children, youth, and adults to alcohol marketing. This may result in the internalization of norms and habits, leading to increases in drinking across these age groups. Despite this, marketing exposure during sports broadcasts does not contravene the industry's self-regulatory guidelines, which aim to protect children and underage drinkers by prohibiting advertising that appeals primarily to youth [4, 5]. This is because these shared viewing occasions are considered “adult viewing”, because underage drinkers do not form a large portion of the audience. As such, they will not be protected by the guidelines from marketing exposure. It would be interesting to use Niederdeppe et al.’s methods to analyze marketing exposure and drinking following major sporting events. This would hopefully allow us to assess the immediate links between exposure to marketing and drinking intentions, attitudes, and behaviors among children, adolescents, young adults, and adults. It would also have been good to have included 18- to 20-year-olds in the study. Despite being underage drinkers in the United States, these youths are adults under the law and are within the legal age to drink in many other countries. They can also still access the adult content in any media and are therefore “legally” watching all of the TV programs that other adults watch. Because they will soon become legal consumers, this group is a particular target for marketing [6, 7], and it is no coincidence that, for example, alcohol companies sponsor college sports. As such, 18- to 20-year-olds are probably as, or more, exposed to alcohol marketing as the older adults in the study [8]. However, they are also of significant concern as an age group that has an incomplete level of brain development that places them at higher risk of negative consequences from drinking. Although concerns are increasing internationally over marketing in the digital world [9, 10], television remains a very important vehicle of communication globally, particularly in developing countries. Alcohol is like tobacco, and we could all benefit from less marketing of a harmful product. Adults need to be better informed about the risks and protected from the marketing of harmful products, so they can support the protection of future generations from these same marketing practices. We can all stand up to do the right thing if we understand how personal choices are shaped. None. The views expressed by the author are her own and do not necessarily reflect the views or position of the Pan American Health Organization

“I want to be beautiful and rich”: Consumer culture ideals internalization and their influence on fashion consumption

ABSTRACT Within the US culture, two consumer culture ideals – namely, the body perfect and the material good life – are dominant. This study addressed the question – how are these two consumer culture ideals internalized? And, how an individual’s degree of internalization of these consumer culture ideals influence one’s fashion consumption behavior? By building on the Tripartite Influence Model, a widely used empirical model in body-image research, a research model was proposed. Data were drawn from self-reported online survey by respondents located in the US (N = 472). The proposed model was tested using structural equation modeling. All but one proposed hypotheses were supported, which explained 20% of the variance for fashion involvement construct (p <.001). Findings of the study revealed that sociocultural factors (i.e. parents, peers, and mass media) contribute to an individual’s degree of cultural ideals internalization, which in turn influences one’s level of body satisfaction and fashion consumption behavior. The findings of the study would be of interest to several entities, including social advertisers and marketers, media activists, and body image educators, among others, which are also discussed.