US Writers Research Articles

Introduction: New Essays on “Race,” Writing, and Representation in Early America

IntroductionNew Essays on “Race,” Writing, and Representation in Early America Robert S. Levine (bio) The essays in this issue of Early American Literature are linked by their interest in race, which remains a problematic term in early American studies (see, for example, the roundtable on race in the 2006 Early American Literature [41.2]). Inspired by Henry Louis Gates’s edited collection “Race,” Writing, and Difference (1986) and Toni Morrison’s “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature” (1989), US Americanists of the past several decades have tended to address race in relation to black-white binaries; but as Ralph Bauer and others have shown, race in early American studies should also be thought of in relation to creolization, nationalism, colonialism, a range of ethnicities, capitalism, styles of discourse, and native studies. In the hybridized space of the Americas in particular, what made a person “white” or “black” or “red” when there were interracial sexual relations across the color line? And when did color really matter, and in what ways? Reflecting on Thomas Jefferson’s rumored sexual relations with his slave Sally Hemings, William Wells Brown, in his 1853 Clotel, presents light-complected slaves whose genealogical connections to “black” people were sometimes well known and sometimes not. Brown’s large aim in this and other of his writings was to destabilize race so that racial thinking itself would come to seem a form of (cultural) insanity. Perhaps more crucially, by underscoring the links between Thomas Jefferson and the situation of the 1840s and 1850s, Brown wanted to call attention to the centrality of racial ideologies to the first sixty years of the new republic. Brown’s insights have been developed by a number of recent critics, who have argued for connections between US literary nationalism and a white racial nationalism (see Gardner). With respect to race, one of the distinct contributions of this set of essays is the chronological time frame, which diverges from a deceptively coherent [End Page 199] focus on the “rise” of the US nation from the late 1780s to the 1850s to examine instead the late seventeenth century to the mid-1830s. Race, writing, and representation, in such a frame, become even more unstable, given the significant differences between racial thinking in the 1670s and the 1830s, and given as well the disconnection, before the 1770s and 1780s, of race and nation. “Race” in this issue puts pressure on how we might think about “early America” itself. Four of the six essays focus on the period running roughly from 1820 to 1836, with 1836, in this issue, being the year that saw the publication not of Emerson’s Nature, one of the key texts of a nation-based US literary studies, but of the Jamaican James Williams’s A Narrative of Events since the First of August, 1834, a text that needs to be read in transatlantic and hemispheric contexts. Nicole N. Aljoe’s “‘Going to Law’: Legal Discourse and Testimony in Early West Indian Slave Narratives” usefully enlarges the frame for studying the slave narrative in the Americas, showing how crucial access to the law was to West Indian ex-slaves, as well as how crucial legal form was to The History of Mary Prince (1831), Negro Slavery as Described by a Negro: Being the Narrative of Ashton Warner (1831), and Williams’s 1834 narrative. Though Aljoe is correct in saying that US slave narratives tend not to focus on specific interactions with the justice system, the far-reaching implication of her argument is to help us see the importance of law to conceptions of race and to nineteenth-century slave narratives. Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Brown, and many other post- 1836 US writers of slave narratives appeal to natural rights in the way of the West Indian writers described by Aljoe. By taking account of the white amanuensis in the narratives of Prince, Warner, and Williams, Aljoe also provides fresh perspectives on the role of white editors and publishers in black literary production. But perhaps the most useful aspect of Aljoe’s essay in the context of this issue is the implied challenge to any study of slavery and race...

H.D.’s American Sea Garden: Drowning the Idyll Threat to US Modernism

H.D.'s first poetry collection, Sea Garden (1916), in many ways exemplifies imagist poetic strategies, with its terse portraits of flowers, landscapes, and coastal inhabitants. Responding to poems' settings, contemporary scholarship often places Sea Garden outside modernist debates about national or cosmopolitan literary movements and instead emphasizes its mythic qualities or its engagement with issues of gender and sexuality. (1) In fact, H.D. today is often considered marginal to geopolitical, cosmopolitan, or nationalist concerns of current modernist studies. Jacob Korg, for example, argues that H.D., while fully sharing [Ezra] Pound's conviction that new forms were needed for new times, did not include contemporary world in her Imagist poetry. She did not observe superficialities of social life, as Pound did, or, with few exceptions, take up urban themes, as Eliot did. The environment of her early poems is nearly exclusively that of ancient Greece. (44-45) Although H.D.'s adaptation of Greek literature and reliance on Greek names--like Pound's use of Chinese--are undeniable, I would like to reconsider argument that her imagist poetry sets aside details of contemporary world. The dryads and gods of Sea Garden may come from Greek poetry, but only one poem, Acon, names Greek places, and it is not set in them. No poem indicates that speaker's location is in Greece, and no poem grounds itself firmly in a classical historical context. Instead, Sea Garden engages same questions of international, cosmopolitan identity and American national belonging that are central to modernist debates about defining US literary identity. Far from evading contemporary world, H.D.'s first poetry collection maps a space for modern American authorship in a global context. And it does this by focusing on ocean that defines geography of transatlantic modernity. Certainly Sea Garden can be read in transnational terms Rebecca Walkowitz identifies in Cosmopolitan Style. Concentrating on twentieth-century British literature, Walkowitz explores doubled cultural entanglements that reflect the literal knotting together of cultures and experiences that seem to be disparate ... and effect of ethical discomfort or embarrassment that is generated by or associations (20). Yet, while H.D. might knot together ancient Greek poetic tradition and scenes from her travels in twentieth-century Europe, I would argue that incommensurate and unconventional associations that drive these early poems are particularly American. Early twentieth-century Anglo European representations of US culture often prompted discomfort and embarrassment for US writers. Even a cursory glance at English-language literary magazines of first few decades of twentieth century reveals that literary critics were absorbed by questions of US national character or spirit. In 1910s and 20s, dozens of American anthologies fought to name distinct, positive qualities of a new US poetry. (2) And for years before that, hardly an issue of US literary magazines went by without some comparative analysis of American poetry and its British precursors designed to address fundamental definitional problems: Does American poetry exist? Is it any good? Will England like it? The drive for US poetry to hold up under comparison to canon of British literature reveals a deeper concern about construction of both US and international modernist movements to which H.D. belonged. These questions circulated because US was seen not to have its own culture but rather to be fledgling heir of its many parent cultures. Sympathetic British reviewers like Robert Nichols might praise US's attempt to merge a mixed heritage into one English-speaking voice of American, in which the properties of ail those nations plus something new becomes vocal (413), but early twentieth-century responses to US poetry continually turn to British critical approval to authorize its value. …

The Aliens Won: SF around the World and Back Again

ESSAY The Aliens Won: SF around the World and Back Again Lovie Tidhar Inthis piece,LavieTidhar?editor inchief of theinfluential WorldSFNews Blog?suggests that we liveinthe GoldenAgeofworldSF.He also addresses theimport of theInternet on SF.Check this month's WLTwebsite tofind more SF on the Web. Thealiensare notwhatyoumight think. The English-language term "World SF" has had more than one meaning over the decades. Its earliest incarnation might well be the first Worldcon, or the World Science Fiction Convention, which took place in New York City in 1939, and was named less out of a desire for true international inclusion than to capitalize on thatyear's World's Fair in the city. Though administered by a "World SF Society" and theoretically open to all, itremains to a large extent an American phenomenon. Much later on, another world SF group formed: comprising several prominent US and UK writers, alongside some counterparts from across the world, its main raison d'?tre seems now?perhaps uncharitably?to have been an excuse for Western writers to drink in "exot ic" locales. Little of substance seemed to have emerged from the group for thebenefit of inter national writers, and it is no longer active. The problem with all previous approaches toworld SF from the English-speaking world? including the handful of specialist anthologies thathave appeared over the decades?has been the fact that,by default, such approaches aswere made were done by (certainly well-meaning) Western authors or editors rather than interna tional writers themselves. All this isnow changing. The Internet has been a radical force for change around the world. In terms of interna tional science fiction, ithas opened theway to a cross-pollination that is trulyglobal, democratiz ing a conversation by opening itup, for the first time, to international writers themselves to initi ate and expand. Forme, that change came into effectin 2005. That year, a group of German science-fiction fans decided to embark on a truly collabora tive, international project: Internova, a magazine devoted to international science-fiction and fan tasy stories, tobe selected, translated, edited, and published by people fromoutside of theAmeri can/Britishworld of SF. The first?and only?issue came out, con taining stories by such writers as Guy Hasson from Israel,Wu Yan fromChina, Vandana Singh from India, and others. Inhindsight, the involve ment of too many people at too many stages made the entire process overly cumbersome; distribution problems plagued it from the start; enthusiasms waned, and a second issue never appeared. And yet. . . It is my contention thatInternovarepresented awatershed mark for world SF. For the firsttime, a group of international writers themselves acted to promote theirown work. Using the Internet, German, Italian, Chinese, and Israeli writers cor responded, collaborated, and togethermade a difference. Having been involved with Internova from an early stage, "recruiting" several friends to become involved (Wu Yan, Guy Hasson, South African Richard Kunzmann, and others), I took enormous inspiration from thework done by the Internova collective. And in the meantime . . . May-June 2010 1 39 SCIENCE FICTION LavieTidhar grew up in Israel and South Africa and has since lived inthe United Kingdom, Vanuatu, and Laos. He isthe author of the novels The Bookman and the forthcoming Camera Obscura, both published by HarperCollins. He isalso the author of the novellas An Occupation of Angels, Cloud Permutations, and Goreland thePot-Bellied God, and two novels with Nir Yaniv, the English-language The Tel Aviv Dossier and the Hebrew Retzach Bidyoni. Other forthcoming novels include Martian Sands and Osama. He isalso a prolific short storywriter and edited the anthologies A Dick & Jane Primer forAdults and The Apex Book ofWorld SF. He runs theWorld SF News Blog at worldsf.wordpress.com. I became aware of other writers like me. Writ ers who worked inmore than one language, or who chose towrite in English in order to reach a wider readership, writers who were passionate about global science fictionand wanted to spread the word. Things were changing. Slowly, international writers began to make an appearance in maga zines?primarily the new wave of Internet pub lications. More novels began to be translated into English, not just in the small press, but by mainstream publishers. And new authors, such...

Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (review)

Reviewed by: Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire Shelley Streeby Keywords Shelley Streeby, Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire, María Deguzmán, American Literature, American Identity, American History, Spain, Anglo-American Identity, Spanish-Americans, Multiculturalism Deguzmán, María. Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. 372 pp. This book is an ambitious survey of US literature and visual culture, from the late eighteenth century through the 1990s, that foregrounds how “figures of Spain” served as foils for an “Anglo-American identity” understood as “transcendentally or transparently ‘American’” (xii). DeGuzmán begins by arguing that, since the 1980s, a multiculturalist paradigm has dominated American literary and cultural studies. This framework, she suggests, has ironically obscured the existence of “a hegemonic ethnic group in the United States”: the “Anglo-American” (xii). She further suggests that the construction of an Anglo-American identity has crucially depended on figures of Spain. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, especially Freud and Lacan, she argues that figures of Spain functioned as “alter egos in the development of ‘American’ imperial identity” (xvii). Throughout US history, she writes, figures of Spain have been “central to the dominant fictions of ‘American exceptionalism,’ revolution, manifest destiny, and birth/rebirth; to Anglo-America’s articulation of its empire as anti-empire (the ‘good’ empire that is not one); and [End Page 402] to its fears of racial contamination and hybridity” (xii). She begins with the literature of the early US republic and the American Renaissance, then moves to the Spanish-Cuban-American War era, next to expatriate US modernist writers from the 1920s to the 1950s, then to “postmodern” literature, film, and photography, including work by Spaniards and Spanish “transplants” to the United States, and finally, turns to late-twentieth-century work by Latina/o writers that uses representations of Spain to respond to US empire and imagine postcolonial identities. Although she suggests that a “double movement” of “romancing” and “repulsion” (xiii) has shaped such figures, for most of the book the emphasis is on the latter, as DeGuzmán examines forms of Anglo-American literature and culture that position Spain as a “vanquished imperialist over and around whose abjected body the Anglo-American empire might be erected” (xxv). The first chapter, “The Shadow of the Black Legend,” explores several examples of canonical US literature in order to examine what she calls “the blackened figure of alien whiteness, the Spaniard” (1). The decision to begin with the literature of the American Renaissance is a little puzzling, for aside from Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” Spain and Spaniards play a relatively minor role in these texts, which were not popular at the time. Much more widely read and influential were W. H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico, where Spain and Spaniards are central, as well as dozens of cheap novelettes about Spaniards and Spanish America (including many in the gothic mode, DeGuzmán’s main subject here) that were part of an emergent mass culture. DeGuzmán argues that Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, Poe’s “William Wilson” and “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and Melville’s novella all “manifest an increasingly explicit conjunction of metaphysical and physical taxonomies and thus the progressive racialization of crime culminating in the transformation of the shadow of the Black Legend into a stain” (63). In other words, in this chapter the focus is on how canonical US writers drew on the Black Legend in order to construct racialized figures of Spain that helped to fortify an emerging Anglo-American and national identity. In the next chapter, DeGuzmán turns from the Black Legend to Orientalism, “the major mode through which Spain, Spaniards, and ‘Spanishness’ were made to signify” (70) in the nineteenth century. While the Orientalized mode “revolved around the fantasy of a colonized or subjugated and exoticized Other” rather than a “hated and feared rival” (70), it still subordinated Spain within imperial hierarchies and produced a sense of US “entitlement” and “aggression” (71). In particular, DeGuzmán suggests, Anglo-American imperial discourse in its orientalizing mode...

Inconvenient Truths: The Communist Conundrum in Life and Art

Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth, Steven G. Kellman. W. W. Norton and Company, 2005. An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell, Robert K. Landers. Encounter Books, 2004. The Lives of Agnes Smedley, Ruth Price. Oxford University Press, 2005. Ralph Ellison: A Biography, Arnold Rampersad. Knopf, 2007. In a contentious lecture following his acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2005, British playwright Harold Pinter offered a pointed distinction between the quest for truth in politics and dramatic art. In the former, truth is unabashedly subordinated to the maintenance of power; in the latter, it exhibits an elusive or contradictory quality, but the search to depict truth is “compulsive.”1 The challenge for scholars in documenting the truth of the lives of twentieth-century US writers captivated by Communism surely requires an attitude analogous to the latter. Yet the difficulty of attaining that standard is apparent in the release by two benchmark university presses of incongruous studies of one of the most politically committed US literary radicals of the past century.

A Challenge to Post-National American Studies: George Yudice's The Expediency of Culture

Although as Peter Fritzsche rightly asserts, “moving from nation to the world is no guarantee of political virtue,” in the pages of American Literary History and other major journals dedicated to consideration of US culture, calls for reorganizing the field of American literary study along post-national lines have sounded for more than 10 years (283). The authors of these position statements sometimes associate this shift in frame with the political impulse Fritzsche criticizes, but at least as often they are also concerned with the genesis of a new institutional home in the academy—a home in which a new type of not-yet-political knowledge might be produced. They call for a critical project organized around either (i) a postcolonial approach to works written by US citizens, (ii) a comparative literature or area studies revival of attention to the writings of immigrants and other border crossers, (iii) an ideology critique of the investment of literary works in American nationalism, especially as it converges with neo-imperial discourse, or (iv) the employment of new nonnational geographical categories—e.g., ecological regions or urban centers—that can serve as parameters for literary study. Common to all these initiatives is a desire to import critical methods from neighboring disciplines and expand the range of primary materials; their shared goal is to stimulate a post-national scholarship that redirects the critical gaze outward, rather than reinforcing the triply centripetal focus of American-based scholars explicating the works of US writers reflecting on a domestic scene.

Becoming fully functional: The conceptual struggle for a new structure for the giant corporation in the US and UK in the first half of the twentieth century

The rapid growth of the larger corporations in the US from the late nineteenth century onwards made the question of the appropriate structure for these new corporate giants of increasing importance to management writers. Particularly difficult was the relationship between line management and functional management as management hierarchies lengthened and specialisms grew in number and scope. Developing ideas from F.W. Taylor and Harrington Emerson by US and UK writers brought confusion as much as it brought progress. Attempts from the late 1920s to evolve organisational proposals by establishing principles of organisation brought modest advances but no conceptual breakthroughs. By the Second World War no management writers appear to have proposed or identified anything resembling the multidivisional form.

Exchanges & Attempts

Page 24 American Book Review Ball continued from previous page than it offers, since it includes only contemporary nonfiction by mostly US writers, who predominantly, though not exclusively, treat places in the US. But it also delivers more than it promises: Most of the essays have at least as much to say about happiness, love, self-discovery, the meaning(s) of (human and nonhuman) life, spirituality, and the art and craft of creative writing as they do about place(s) per se. Moreover, each of the thirteen authors whose texts are collected here (most of which were previously published) wrote an additional essay specifically for this volume—a commentary situating, reflecting on, or otherwise extending their earlier text. I would argue that some of these commentaries (David Gessner’s, John Hanson Mitchell’s, and Reg Saner’s come to mind) are about as rewarding as the “real” essays to which they refer, almost workable as stand-alone pieces. Therefore, I was able to imagine different readers benefiting from the book in different ways. I could imagine an environmentally-sensitive creative writing professor making it required reading for her undergraduate students in order to expose them to a wider-than-usual range of contemporary approaches to American “nature writing”—a range that even includes Gessner’s thoughts about his love-hate relationship with the whole genre and its practitioners, and Simone Poirier-Bures’s almost ethnographic account of an encounter with Kyrgyz people. I could also imagine nature writers and literary ecocritics— even those who are already familiar with the previously published essays—taking an avid interest in the new auto-commentaries. (As a big fan of Scott Russell Sanders’s Staying Put [1993] and Writing from the Center [1995]—essays from both appear here—I was excited to discover him backpedaling on his earlier use of the phrase “native ground.”) Actually, I could picture aspiring writers of creative nonfiction in general finding the book provocative for its authors’ deliberations about the challenges of striking an appropriate balance between descriptive accuracy and other elements and concerns. Elizabeth Dodd: “The challenge always was to keep from veering too far in either direction: to keep the factual information from sounding as though I had eaten a textbook and to keep the music of imagination grounded in the actual details of the literal world.” Robert Root presses the issue further, arguing that writing about the world inevitably turns into writing about “not the way the world is but the way certain filters affect the way the world appears to be to the author.” Such readers will also benefit from the many questions the authors raise about the dialectic of looking outward and looking inward. “For me, writing about place means examining the intersection of place with self.” Personally, I was most taken in by one of the collection’s many undercurrents: the question of humans ’attachments to places, especially investments in landscapes and nonhuman organisms. There is much talk of love, affection, affinity, intimate connection , and attachment—even of “having a love affair with the land.” Revealingly, the metaphor of marriage comes up repeatedly. Kim Barnes describes her attachment to western landscapes as “[a] stable and monogamous marriage of need, expectation, and fulfillment.”And Sanders says, “We marry ourselves to the creation by knowing and cherishing a particular place, just as we join ourselves to the human family by marrying a particular man or woman.” Gessner, on the other hand, takes it in a different direction: “Talk of settling and geographical marriage made me uneasy…If [Wendell] Berry had married his land and become its steward, that was fine. But I was beginning to define myself against him as a kind of polygamist of place.” Collectively, the texts in this collection transform love and attachment into a larger argument—an argument that place matters, that places like these matter, that landscapes and organisms like these matter.And, consequently, these texts comprise an argument that these kinds of love and attachment matter. Still, as someone persuaded that human psychodynamics relating to love, marriage, and family emerge in patterns which correlate with particular historical forms of social, economic, and political organization, these authors’ accounts left me...

Charles Reis Felix's Through a Portagee Gate: Lives Parceled Out in Stories

The recent publication of Charles Reis Felix's Through a Portagee Gate (2004) is a unique addition to Portuguese American Literature, a still relatively small field but one that, in the last twenty-five years, has experienced what amounts to a flurry of critical and artistic activity.1 Both an autobiography of the author and a biography of the author's father, Through a Portagee Gate is remarkable because ideologically and thematically it blurs generic boundaries; further, it employs a highly creative mode of storytelling to articulate its autobiographical content. Although there are about a dozen Portuguese immigrant and ethnic autobiographies by US writers, none attain the level of literary sophistication and mastery of the representation of orality that Felix's work manifests.2 Through a Portagee Gate is comprised of two life stories or intercultural itineraries: that of the ethnic narrator Charles Felix, and that of the immigrant Joe Felix, Charles's father. The book does not have a subtitle or any other designation identifying it as an autobiography, a biography, or a combination of the two. As George Monteiro argues, the book is both an autobiography and a biography (Preface xii). What I would like to propose, however, is that Felix's work embodies several interrelated subjectivities: that of the immigrant father, who is allowed to tell his own life story in his own voice; that of the individual of Portuguese descent, who distanced himself from the ancestral culture and initially was

Getting by with a little help from their friends

PurposeReviews the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoints practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.Design/methodology/approachThis briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.FindingsAccording to US writer Denis Waitley, imagination combined with innovation leads to realization. Such sentiments have obviously been taken on board at Lunar Design, a new product design company able to boast an impressive record of providing groundbreaking solutions that help its clients sustain competitive advantage. As the last decade has brought profit, excellence awards and recognition as a benchmark organization, this company is clearly doing something right. Lunar is big on imagination and innovation. Then again, it has to be. Many of its new and established clients operate within high‐speed industries where technology's unrelenting progress ensures that product life cycles are invariably short lived. Against this background of perpetual change, success depends on being able to identify developments before they actually take root.Practical implicationsProvides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.Originality/valueThe briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to‐digest format.

Competition Law Chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law

The rapid pace of economic globalization and the dramatic turn toward economic competition as the central factor in public policy thinking would seem to augur well for comparative competition law scholarship. Together, they have brought a wave of new antitrust statutes and increased the perceived importance of existing competition laws. Moreover, economic globalization brings those laws into increasingly frequent and direct contact and sometimes confrontation. Yet comparative analysis in this area has seldom gone beyond pure description to provide analytical insights into such issues. With notable exceptions, scholarship in the area remains limited, superficial, and often distorted. This essay examines where such scholarship is, why it is not elsewhere, and how it might be developed to respond more effectively to the challenges of globalization. It looks first at the current state of the literature - what has been and is being written? Which subjects are treated from which angles and subject to what kinds of influences. I then identify some of the forces that have created this literature and that are at work today. Finally, I envision a path for comparative antitrust law scholarship that may allow it to realize more fully its potential value and respond more effectively to the challenges of economic globalization. Three main themes run through this essay. One is that US law dominates the world of comparative competition law scholarship. It provides the background that frames such scholarship, and it thereby colors and shapes it as well. A second, and related, theme is that the centrality of US law and experience divides the writing in the area and often distorts it. This dominance generates two fundamentally different perspectives on competition law. In one, US writers look out at the world and say follow us. In the other, non-US writers ask, How do we assess US experience and how do we respond to US power and pressure? The third thread that runs through this chapter identifies the potential impact of economic globalization on the agenda of comparative competition law and the opportunities it creates for writers in that area to contribute to creating a sounder policy framework for transnational markets.

Ethnographies of Transnational Migration in Ruben Martinez's Crossing Over

border is a marketplace. The invisible hand of powerful governs crossings. --Amitava Kumar, Passport Photos (219) The emphasis on binational and transnational relations in Studies in last two decades (1) has coincided with important thematic changes in post-movement (2) literature by US writers of Mexican origin. In 1990s and 2000s, autobiographical works by Juan Felipe Herrera, Michele Serros, and Norma E. Cantu, journalistic chronicles (3) of Ruben Martinez and Luis Alberto Urrea, fiction of Sandra Cisneros, Paul S. Flores, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, and Demetria Martinez, as well as performances of Guillermo Gomez-Pena have exposed instances of uprooting, intercultural contact, violence, and exploitation in a wide context of trans-American relations. (4) Many of these writers continue to claim label Chicano for themselves as a sign of intellectual commitment to struggle for social justice of citizens and non-citizens of Mexican origin. However, for these or Chicana authors, relationship between US and Mexico, between US and Latin America, is not only part of past, but also part of present and most immediate future of Latinos in United States. These writers' experiences of physical and cultural mobility as Chicanos and Chicanas certainly constitute a springboard to understand other instances of dislocation that may not be identical to their own, but that are equally rooted in power imbalances between First and Third World. We may say, therefore, that these authors partake of a consciousness, if, following theoretical work of James Clifford and Stuart Hall, refers to voluntary and involuntary migrations and movements resulting from shifting power structures and to new subjectivities and cultural practices within multiple forms of global mobility. Initially, one feels reluctant to apply concept of diaspora to a Mexican American experience such as one narrated in Ruben Martinez's chronicle Crossing Over. Transnational Mexican workers have not definitely abandoned their land, nor is this land distant and remote as term implies. Since seasonal work causes migrant workers to go back and forth from one country to another, they do return to Mexico, although often not at their own will. Thus, when we apply notion of diaspora to these migrants' constant contact with place of origin, we are doing it in a new sense that differs from one often assigned to Jewish or African diasporas. (5) Within shift from cultural nationalism to American transhemispheric relations, mestizo/a, migrant, or diasporic consciousness necessarily faces challenge of coming to grips with disparate nature of transnational conflicts. The socio-economic divisions between Third and First World that border metaphorically represents can be felt both in North and in South with different degrees of intensity and with site-specific dynamics that cannot be overlooked. We should consider, quoting Lora Romero, that the border cuts both ways (247) and that it cuts differently depending on which side we find ourselves. Thus, in crossing over into Latin America, writer will have to grapple with representation of those who live south of border and may want to cross legally or illegally in opposite direction with purposes and socio-cultural backgrounds that differ considerably from hers or his. A discussion of representation of turn-of-this-century transnational migration by a second-generation like Ruben Martinez will always be tied to issues of otherness, for interaction between Mexican and will bring to fore responses in accordance with writer's cultural, gender, class, and racial position north and south of border. As Amitava Kumar observes, post-colonial writing acquires a preeminent critical potential when an experience of migration and travel is used to dwell on a global condition of displacement, but it is also then that this writing reveals its shortcomings at representing those whose voice is often silenced (10). …

Good looking: in defense of scenic landscape aesthetics

Among US writers on environmental aesthetics, it has become de rigueur to leverage Aldo Leopold’s legacy against the proliferation of “popular” landscape tastes, which are typically seen to have their origins in 17th–19th century European traditions of landscape painting and aesthetics. These writers regard victims of popular or “scenic” landscape tastes (exemplified by Olmsted’s Central Park) as intellectually shallow, motivated by momentary “sensory pleasures”, and passively and anthropocentrically drawn to “naturalistic” environments rather than actively and biocentrically engaged with natural environments. This implicit refusal to grant sensory information and affective processing the power to catalyze and inform serious reflection is not new; neither is the attribution of popular landscape aesthetics to the elite society of a limited culture and historical period surprising, given the current preponderance of post-modernist sensibilities. However, in the often highly-charged atmosphere of local environmental planning and management arenas, both positions are needlessly polemical. More importantly, there is good evidence to suggest that both positions are founded on misconceptions about how the human mind works. In this paper, we will review work that establishes the intellectual bona fides of visual imagery, the important contributions that emotions make to cognition, and the likelihood that explanations of environmental aesthetics rooted in European enlightenment-era landscape painting are inadequate. This review suggests that frequent calls for new normative environmental aesthetics based on a cognitive understanding of ecological sustainability are likely premature. As social scientists, we suggest that attempts to impose prescribed environmental aesthetics (albeit ecologically pure environmental aesthetics) are inappropriate and may well be self-defeating. Instead, we suggest that a thorough understanding of visual and non-visual environmental aesthetics is needed, including examinations of the possibility that affect elicited by scenic encounters with preferred landscapes can lead people to form emotional attachments to the land and thereby develop a greater appreciation for sustainability goals.

L2 Professional Writing in a US and South American Context

Using research methods that assess cross-cultural rhetorical differences at three levels, this study explores two cases of professional writing among US and South American personnel in one multinational organization in Quito, Ecuador. One major rhetorical difference was the pronounced need of many of the South Americans for historical and contextual information. In addition, the US writer consistently re-worked the concrete and particular patterns of the South Americans into more abstract and universal patterns for his US audiences. Finally, many of the South American documents exhibited accumulated logical structures, which the US writer revised to be more analytical for his US audiences. These differences in history, context, particularism, and accumulative logic seemed to reflect very predominant cultural patterns because they correlated closely with other cross-cultural studies. However, some rhetorical differences such as originality and hypercodification reflected local usage while others, such as distance and procedures, seemed based on personal choice and adaptation to specific audiences. Thus, this study exemplifies the larger, cultural and rhetorical patterns that seem central to basic theories of contrastive rhetoric, but it also highlights the exceptions and preferences that are based on local and individual needs.

Designing Written Business Communication along the Shifting Cultural Continuum

The increasing importance of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) to the US economy makes understanding Mexico important. Because the histories and cultures of the United States and Mexico differ significantly, written communications also differ. Rhetorical strategies for written business communication in Mexico reflect the country's bloody, cyclical history and its resulting culture characterized by collectivism, high power distances, fatalism, and emphasis on building trust and relationships. Despite Mexico's economic problems, it is a country in transition. Because of the increasing presence of US business entities in Mexico, communication protocols are changing as US technology and ways of doing business infuse the traditional Mexican culture. Understanding how to communicate effectively in Mexico requires understanding its history and culture as well as changes occurring there. US writers must know where any Mexican company is situated along this changing cultural continuum and how the continuum shapes the design of written business communication.

Prologue to revolution: Cuba, 1898-1958

Jorge Ibarra, Prologue to Revolution: Cuba, 1898-1958 (trans. Marjorie Moore. Boulder and London: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 1998), 229pp.This is the first work by Jorge Ibarra, Cuba's most distinguished social historian, to appear in English. First published in Cuba in 1995 (Editorial de Ciencias Sociales), it appears now in Reinner's Studies in Cuban History Series, edited by the Cuban-American historian Louis A. Perez, Jr. It is a welcome addition to the slowly growing list of works by Cuban historians now available to anglophone readers in a field hitherto dominated by US and Cuban-American writers. This is more particularly the case, since it provides us for the first time with a Cuban historian's perspective on a period which has already attracted worldwide as well as much Cuban scholarly attention.The book presents a forceful, rigorously documented and keenly analytical interpretation of the economic, social and political circumstances which produced the 1959 Cuban Revolution. It is densely written and comprehensively conceived. Building on a swathe of carefully critiqued Cuban statistical, periodical and secondary sources, Ibarra investigates the shifting economic and political conditions of each class and stratum within the class: its composition is carefully defined and its history is then traced across the whole period. This innovative approach establishes that the impetus for revolution derived not, as other writers (Blackburn, 1963; Sabbatini, 1968) have suggested, solely from the proletarianization of the middle class, but from the proletarianization of the people, middle class, peasant, proletarian and youth as a whole.Central to this process was the operation of US capital which moved into the island on a substantial scale in the wake of the 1895-1898 War of Independence and, assisted by US tariff policies and reciprocal trade treaties (1902, 1934), siphoned off Cuba's national surplus. It dominated sugar, tobacco, transport, utilities and, increasingly from 1934, the Cuban import market. Cuban governments depended on loans from US banking houses (they were not allowed to borrow in Europe) and, from 1927, on US government bodies which could exert (like the IMF) even closer control of Cuban government policies.Within this framework, however, elements of Cuban and Spanish capital survived and one of Ibarra's most interesting findings is that among the import and export merchants, traditionally considered simply as pillars of US neocolonialism, there were some who played a dual role as merchants and industrialists. They maintained significant interest in sugar and tobacco, expanded into paper and textile mills, cement and crackers, beer and footwear, and also into banking.This trend accelerated, as in most of Latin America, in World War II when US imports were reduced. Most enterprises, however, were small scale (almost 50 percent had five workers), so a nationwide working class did not develop. And although large-scale Cuban landlords and leaseholders maintained and expanded (1932-1959), their hold on agricultural production - more than 50 percent of sugar production in 1958 came from Cuban-owned mills - they did not use their profits to modernize production. Cuban capital gains, instead, increasingly took refuge in foreign banks, real estate investments and illicit activities. These investments generated what Ibarra calls an absentee bourgeoisie whose interests were allied with international capital and the US mafia. This was the economic structure which under the impact of the 1930s world depression resulted in the unfinished 1933 revolution and the successful 1959 uprisings.In the first decades of the Republic the middling classes (small merchants, manufacturers, proprietors and professionals) joined forces to defend their political interests, opposing US exploitation and its corrupt Cuban government agents, and playing a leading role in the movement to topple Machado. …

The right to a fair trial

Few newspaper readers can even have been aware of the need for double-blind clinical trials of new drugs, until the recent furore over the early results of such a trial.The Independent was explicit in its front page lead story on 7 April (“Drug can halve the risk of breast cancer”). The Guardian was more cautious (“Drug may halve risk of breast cancer”). Their common subject was the release of data from a trial in the US indicating that tamoxifen might be highly beneficial in women who were especially vulnerable to the disease.The contrast between these and other substantial reports in UK broadsheet newspapers and those in the tabloids was striking. The Sun, for example, ignored the news altogether, while the Mirror gave it three sentences at the bottom of page 7. So much for the women readers of these mass circulation papers.But this was no ordinary clinical trial. The US National Cancer Institute had indeed announced results (from the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project) which apparently showed a 45% reduction in the risk of invasive breast cancer in those of 13,000 women who had been receiving tamoxifen as a preventative in a double-blind trial.The findings, however, were publicised 14 months before the original target date because early results suggested that the drug was proving highly effective. Abandoning the trial protocol, and thus sacrificing some of the intended clarity in the results, the organizers had taken the unusual step of breaking the double-blind.Hence the prudence of the Guardian's headline, and the cautionary comments from UK experts embedded in its account and in most other UK coverage. In general, however, journalists paid more attention to the known side-effects of tamoxifen, rather than to the possibility that its administration had simply postponed the development of breast cancer and had not prevented it altogether.It was the potential for toxicity, too, which persuaded several US newspapers to use headlines such as “Cancer breakthrough comes with big risk” (USA Today) and “Breast cancer study offers hope but no easy answers” (Los Angeles Times). Although most British accounts mentioned other on-going UK and international studies (albeit briefly in some cases), most US writers totally ignored them.The US papers reflected anxieties about the side-effects, not the incompleteness of the resultsThey continued to do so even after a press conference called in London by the Cancer Research Campaign and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, which received extensive coverage in the British press on 8 April. In contrast to expert comments published the previous day (“This is very, very encouraging”, Dr Trevor Powles; “We are delighted”, Dr John Toy), the tone became extremely sceptical.“Doctors accuse US of wrecking cancer drug test … Researchers are angry that early announcement of results ruins other trials,” said the results ruins other trails,” said the Times. “US breast cancer claims denounced … It will take years to be sure about new drug,” said the Guardian.The Guardian's coverage at this stage was superb. In addition to a news item, health correspondent Sarah Boseley contributed a comprehensive analysis, two thirds of a page in length, accompanied by diagrams and references to source material. This was a model feature of the type often required by the public but seldom provided by the media, and which is essential to explain such a complex issue fully.The Times adopted a similar approach, with a collation of four pieces on different aspects of the story. One was an admirably succinct summary by science editor Nigel Hawkes of the problems created by the premature termination of the US study, focusing particularly on the important questions that will now never be answered.With the conspicuous exception of the New York Times, caveats concerning the “wrecked” trial were largely absent from US coverage. Reports were tempered, certainly, by warnings of side-effects, and in some instances by careful observations on the potential application of genetic tests to identify high-risk women. But few reporters highlighted the inherent uncertainties in conclusions from a study abandoned long before the end of the time originally deemed necessary for unambiguous results. And the word “breakthrough” was much used.Were UK readers, on the other hand, likely to be confused by the spectacle of one seemingly authoritative group of experts repudiating research findings reported by another? After all, this was not a clash of opinion as to what causes obesity, autism or depression, but a disagreement over the very foundations of scientific method.The question is valid. Nevertheless, Britain's newspaper readers probably learned more about the theoretical and practical dilemma inherent in double-blind studies than US readers did from their country's style of reportage. As the Los Angeles Times observed, this was a story with no easy answers. Yet the wider perspective adopted by most UK journalists did much to aid understanding.

Reader's guide to twentieth-century science fiction

The guide offers biographical sketches and critical analyses of more than 150 authors, including well-known US writers, authors from the New Wave, Cyberpunk, and feminist science fiction subgenres, and authors from countries such as Great Britain, Poland, Australia and the Soviet Union. Also included are analyses of each author's style and themes, plot summaries of authors' award winning and major works, a list of selected biographic and bibliographic readings, and appendixes listing titles, Hugo and Nebula award winners, and science fiction journals and magazines.

Not only computing – also art

Abstract One of the pleasures oí being in a profession as young as computing is that it is possible to have met many of its founding figures: Konrad Zuse, for example, the German engineer who could fairly lay el aim to being the first to have made a computer; Edmund C. Berkeley, the US writer who recently visited the BCS; Stanley Gill, a pioneer who also did much to help start the Computer Arts Society; as well as numerous BCS members whom 1 see from time to time. Computing and mathematics became central to my interests too late for me to have met Alan Turing – but I do know some who were well-acquainted with him from their work at Bletchley during the war or, in the following ten years, at NPL or Manchester. I first became aware of him in the mid-fifties after reading his article on solvable and unsolvable problems in the Penguin Science News. This was published in February 1954 and, as he died in June 1954, it must have been one of his last works. But it was not until the publication of his mother Sara’s biography of him in 1959 that I realised what an important and interesting figure he was.