Masthead and table of contents of the present issue.

Amid the chaos of pandemics or wars, the conflict extends beyond mere human struggles with (their) commonsensically understood “demons”—fears, ambitions, traumas, desires, angsts, and all of other conditions and structures always-already in place even before we become aware of them. Although, beyond doubt, such “side effects” of being-in-the-world or being-with-others generate facts that are effect-producing, whether these facts prove to be morally actionable depends on if and how we engage them. Summing up the mission of the post-Crisis IASA, I build my argument around Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of personal responsibility in the face of the Daemon of Eternal Recurrence, Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenological hermeneutics, and leading Western existentialists to demonstrate that, at least in the Western perspective, the conflict also entails, perhaps more crucially, a fierce battle between the daimōn and the daemonium. Recognizing the eternal recurrence of such catastrophes such as pandemics or wars, the “Greek mindset,” embracing the daimōn, fosters an existential philosophy that emphasizes participation in the realm of immanence, shaping our ethical considerations and propelling actions. In contrast, the “Latin approach,” in constant fear of the daemonium, seems to foster self-perception as constantly plunged in “fear and trembling,”  despairingly “sick unto death,” and prone to attributing malevolent forces to the “evil spirits,” thereby generating configurations that shift the narrative towards self-absolution, and ultimately legitimize refigurations that, diluting personal responsibility, delegate it to transcendence. Embracing Greek thought, we engage in an ongoing quest with facta-ficta, revising language critically (Gr. κρίνω), without expecting finality in our categories, acknowledging that our imperfect language is essential for defining our existence within immanence. Conversely, “Latin thinking,” in which demons are seen as elements of a transcendent realm—unreachable without relinquishing the self, or as part of a faith-based narrative, and in which human is potentially lacking tangible impact—involves the risk of rendering us indifferent to historical lessons, legitimizing a fatalistic nihil novi as a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

The world has recently experienced the ravages of the COVID-19 epidemic and new, terrible wars. The pandemic and the wars now being waged show us how fragile human life is on our planet. The facts that the COVID-19 virus came originally from one or more animals that are part of the human food chain, and that the viruses themselves are forms of life very different from plants and animals, have altered our perception of our place in the world. Wars fought in this changed biological context have also shown how precarious the balance of power is in what we have come to see as a global humanity. Scholars in the fields of Humanities and Cultural Studies have risen to the occasion by focusing on the cultural effects of biological and war-time violence-related catastrophes. In this issue of RIAS focusing on the Americas and their influence on the world, we look at the implications of pandemics and wars, and human reactions to similar threats in the past, such as the pandemic of the Spanish flu which decimated soldiers during World War I. And once again, literature comes to our rescue in the time of heightened angst, showing us paths of the mind already present in American literature that may nudge us in a better direction. Existential homelessness, Buddhism, and meditation, also appear here as “life matters,” and that in the double sense: they are both matters of life and signals that life, and especially human life, must matter.

How does an African-American writer experience Americanness? What does one do when one feels himself born an outcast in one’s own country and then discovers that that country is the only one he can regard as home? Despite—or perhaps because of—his extraordinary gifts, James Baldwin viewed himself as a stranger in America, and his sense of exclusion was threefold, arising not only from his blackness but also from his homosexuality and his identity as an intellectual. At the age of 24, fearing that his life in the United States might soon topple either into violence or a fatal self-contempt, Baldwin traveled to Paris, where he remained for many years. In a superficial sense, Baldwin’s transatlantic life afforded him two homes instead of one. Yet, as his writings confirm, Baldwin’s experiences outside the United States convinced him that he had no true spiritual home anywhere. He could not be truly, comfortably himself in either location. This essay discusses how Baldwin’s European sojourns served to confirm his Americanness — a confirmation he could regard only as bittersweet and tragic. Having observed White Americans both at home and abroad, Baldwin was able to reflect eloquently on the American need to regard itself as somehow exempt from the judgments that hang heavily over the rest of the world. He saw America’s desperate insistence on its own innocence as pervading the nation’s character, whether it was expressed in racial attitudes, foreign policy, or the complex repressions of sexual longing. And that need for exemption circled back to America’s distrust of serious thought and the fear that earnest intellectual labor would tear aside once and for all the mask and myth of American purity. The failure of America, he believed, was a failure of honesty compounded by an incapacity to love. Finding nothing outside of America in which to place his faith, Baldwin placed his profoundly reluctant confidence in the United States. Like Baldwin, we must place our reliance in sympathy, forgiveness, and a rediscovery of common ground. We must, in short, rediscover love, for we, too, have no other place to go.

This article offers a brief exploration of the contradictory meanings of "war" and "peace", beginning with the ways in which, paradoxically, one term is supposed to engender its opposite. Inspired by sources as diverse as James Madison, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and Judith Butler, the author tries to imagine what it would take to break the war-and-peace continuum.

The Covid 19 era presents yet another instance of the symbiosis between viral pandemic and pestilence in the political culture of the moment. Through a brief reprise of plague-riven history dating from antiquity, this article explores the symptoms of the current epidemic and offers a number of keywords that characterize the current maladies as viral plague and as political pestilence. The coupling of the viral and the political dates from the third century Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius who took the measure of the plague and political corruption of Rome during his reign. The lexical compendium offered here could constitute a study in cultural epidemiology that defines the exhibited symptoms of pandemic disease in its concurrent medical and socio-cultural manifestations.

The paper outlines a sociological perspective on the healthcare system in the United States from a perspective of biomedicalization processes. Methodologically, the argument pays its intellectual debts to the American tradition in the sociology of health and illness in which problems of healthcare and individual well-being are discussed in the functionalist context of axiological and normative regulation. Our article focuses on the biomedicalization crisis as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic. The outbreak is conceptualized as a trigger of structural tensions already implicit in the American system of biomedicalized healthcare. Rather than focusing on the political polarization of the US society in the wake of the outbreak, the paper sees the pandemic in terms of ‘cultural trauma’ and related political conflicts which threaten to destabilize the discourse and organization of healthcare in the United States. The salient role in this process is attributed to anti-vaccination movements which abuse the pandemic situation to subvert the principles of biomedicalization. In the case of the Covid-19 pandemic, anti-vaccination movements are disseminating misinformation and anti-vaccination sentiments, effectively channeling the public’s dissatisfaction with the implemented methods of crisis management and undermining the pivotal principles of biomedicalization.   

The novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider, authored by Katherine Anne Porter and published in 1939, is set against the backdrop of the 1918–1919 Spanish flu pandemic towards the end of World War I. It narrates the dual story of individual and societal trauma and survival amidst the pandemic, contributing to the cultural memory of that era in American history. The narrative draws heavily on autobiographical elements, with the protagonist Miranda’s experiences closely reflecting Porter’s own. As Miranda battles a life-threatening flu, her delirious mind traverses past, present, and future, blurring the boundaries between them. This paper examines Porter’s employment of modernist techniques such as dreams, visions, archetypes, biblical allusions, and stream of consciousness to articulate Miranda’s harrowing yet transformative passage through a liminal space between life and death. Porter’s novelistic approach is distinctly modern in its exploration of mortality and the portrayal of Miranda’s near-death experience, aligning her with modernist contemporaries like T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, who also eschewed traditional literary forms to depict the profound dislocations of their time. The enduring appeal of Pale Horse, Pale Rider lies in its rich symbolism and psychological depth in addressing themes of death and illness.

In his eponymous poem, Robert Frost conceptualizes design as a fundamental aspect of human existence, exploring the interplay between life’s grand forces and the underlying philosophical structure of existence. This notion is paralleled in the human body, viewed as a living embodiment of design, encompassing both external appearance and internal complexity. Biomedical science, particularly significant during the pandemic, has reshaped our comprehension of the human body, influencing lifestyle and societal perceptions. Yellapragada SubbaRow, an Indian-born American biochemist, made groundbreaking contributions to medical science, including the development of methotrexate for cancer treatment, the application of folic acid in prenatal care, and the creation of a versatile antibiotic. These advancements, alongside the pandemic-induced shift in societal outlook, have altered the approach to human health and wellness. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has drawn the world’s attention to the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of biomedical practice, SubbaRow’s contributions may serve as excellent exemplars of integrating scientific innovation with philosophical inquiry, advocating for an approach that harmonizes scientific rigor with ethical integrity to foster civilizational progress. The study contends that design transcends mere tools and structures, embodying the fusion of human perception and intellect, which drives creativity and innovation essential for human evolution. Through examining SubbaRow’s philosophy, this article seeks to elucidate the post-pandemic paradigm shift in human existence and its ethical implications.

This paper explores the way in which Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer-prize-winning debut novel, The Sympathizer (2015) reframes history by outlining unseen continuities, reimagining the war in Vietnam as a Petri dish for America’s Forever War, as if yesterday’s wars and today’s were one the mirror of the other. The Sympathizer is not about war as much as about war narratives and the power rationales that allow for their unequal dissemination. It tackles the well-rooted idea of the Second Indochina War as a war that defies representation. In this instance, however, aesthetic (un)representability of war is not intended as a philosophical matter as much as a political issue. The question is not “Is the war in Vietnam representable?” as much as “Whose representation of the war in Vietnam gets passed down?” In other words, the issue at hand is not representability but representations. All the cultural artifacts addressing the war’s memory, in Nguyen’s view, are fabrications that convey partial perspectives. A narrative about narratives, The Sympathizer is informed by a logic according to which the only way to expose this state of things is to put together a fiction at once realist and antirealist that with its own existence single-handedly redefines collective memory as “an arena of competing narratives, an uneven field dominated by the memory machines of Hollywood” (Chattarji). By bending the facts, Nguyen brings into question the power circumstances that make misrepresentation possible. 

Emerson’s affinity with Buddhism has been the source of much controversy, and his adaptation of the doctrine translated as Buddhist “indifference” has been construed as stifling resistance to social injustice. I will revisit this topic, explaining why Emerson figures so prominently in discussions of Buddhism by the philosopher D. T. Suzuki and the British scholar R. H. Blyth, in order to develop a context for analyzing modes of resistance in Richard Wright’s late haiku-inspired poetry. A central question raised in critical debates is whether or not Wright turns away in these poems from the social and political concerns of his earlier works. I will show that their significance and force as protest poetry is considerably stronger when regarded in light of Wright’s “tough-souled pragmatism” and an Emersonian pragmatist tradition elaborated by scholars such as Cornel West, James Albrecht, and Douglas Anderson, a tradition characterized by East-West intercultural exchange that includes John Dewey and Ralph Ellison. Contextualized and enriched by this tradition, the poem Wright selected out of the 4000 to open his collection, “I am nobody,” can be read as alluding to Ellison’s allusion to Emerson in Invisible Man, protesting what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would some years later memorably describe as “a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’” in his celebrated “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” I will conclude with a brief consideration of how Wright’s creative engagement with Buddhism in the work of T. S. Eliot illuminates Emerson’s vastly neglected contribution to the development of high modernism.

The idea of dissent has often been discussed in association with the works of the Transcendentalists, who greatly influenced the literary and philosophical landscape of the United States in the 19th century. This article aims to shed light on an often-ignored side of Ralph Waldo Emerson who, often described as an aloof thinker, was an adamant dissenter and, more specifically, a conscientious reformer. By focusing on his theory of reform as expressed in a selection of essays devoted to this theme, this paper argues that Emerson’s concept of reform, though primarily directed towards the individual, was also intended to have repercussions in society at large. This dichotomy of individualism and communal effort is analyzed in texts which cover a twenty-year span in Emerson’s life, to demonstrate it is an opposition that must be reevaluated and possibly resolved.  

Twenty years into the 21st century, the matters of forced mobilities, relocations and displacement are more than ever issues at hand, as we keep on witnessing ceaseless global migratory movements resulting from political persecutions, wars, violence, and/or climate change. Taking the cue from the intersections of environmental transformations, global ecological crisis and human mass mobilities, Judith Rauscher’s Ecopoetic Place-Making (2023) focuses on contemporary “American ecopoetries of migration,” namely the “the oeuvres of […] chosen poets that prominently feature American places and American histories of displacement” (2023: 31).  Drawing mostly from the fields of Ecocriticism and Mobilities Studies, her work explores the complex relationship between migratory subjects and the non-human world, in particular, “the many ways in which human-nature relations are shaped by physical and geographical movement, whether voluntary or forced” (2023: 34) as well as “the varying effects that these displacements in place and between places have […] on the environmental imaginaries in the works of contemporary American poets of migration” (2023: 24).  Ecopoetic Place-Making offers an interesting and thought-provoking analysis of five contemporary authors (Craig Santos Perez, Juliana Spahr, Derek Walcott, Agha Shahid Ali, and Etel Adnan), migrants of different national, cultural, ethnic, and racial backgrounds. Drawing inspiration from their own experiences of mobilities, these poets, through their works, challenge restrictive and exclusive ideas of place-attachment. This text is a critical review of Judith Rauscher's monograph.

The article offers a critical review of The Gift of Languages. Paradigm Shift in U.S. Foreign Language Education by Fabrice Jaumont & Kathleen Stein-Smith, published by TBR Books in 2019. The book, fitting in the general category of instruction manuals and motivational materials, has been written in support of the cause of the advocates of the paradigm shift in foreign language learning in the United States. Focusing on the need to expand the L2 skills among US elementary, high school, and college students by means of the systematic implementation of two-way Dual-Language Immersion programs in K-12 and secondary public education, the monograph contributes to the mission of the Center for the Advancement of Language, Education and Communities. The CALEC, a non-profit organization with international membership and worldwide reach, focuses on promoting multilingualism and cross-cultural understanding by supporting language communities in creating programs of education in languages and cultures. The present article offers a review of this important, albeit popular, publication as a document testifying to the transformations of the American culture in the Age of Globalization.

International American Studies Association’s Official Statement on the Violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, signed on 23rd October, 2023.

Information on the RIAS editorial policy and stylesheet for RIAS Contributors.