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Journal: Review of International American Studies

(Un)Imagined Shores

Cyraina Johnson-Roullier

Language: EN | Published: 01-05-2015 | Abstract

The theme of the IASA 6th World Congress, ‘Oceans Apart: In Search of New Wor(l)ds’ was a fitting context in which to ask the question how did the Americas become America? And, inversely, how can America be turned inside out to reveal the Americas to which it is ineradicably, albeit perhaps surreptitiously—yet certainly historically—linked, and what might that meanfor our understanding of American Studies as a field? How does the ocean itself, and its boundaryless significance, figure in whatever understanding of America and/or the Americas comes to the fore.The essays included in this issue of the Review of International American Studies each consider this question in very different ways, from the exploration of the role of the ocean in American literature, to that of the power of the ocean’s imaginary reality itself to shape our understanding of that literature. Ever present within these questions is that of the long history of empire embedded in the idea of America and all things American, what exactly that history is to mean, and how it is to be understood, especially when contextualized by the cultural significance of the ocean. With the ocean in mind, in keeping with the Congress theme, the meaning of America seems to radically shift, as the reality of the Americas becomes more evident. As this stable meaning is troubled, as traditional boundaries begin to reform in new configurations, the possibility for new discoveries about the meaning of America comes into greater prominence. But this view from the ocean, with its new perspective on old understandings, doesn’t necessarily have to mean ‘out to sea’.

As Giorgio Mariani asserts, there is often a certain anxiety, even among those, like the members of the International American Studies Association, who adventurously leave their academic and intellectual points of origin to carve out new epistemological roadmaps, leading not infrequently beyond known disciplinary parameters, as these have been structured within the university. What is it about the unboundedness of uncontained knowledge, for which the sea is a striking metaphor, that can hide a subtle yet nonetheless yawning fear? There is the ever-present possibility of drowning, requiring the superhuman control necessary to calmly tread water until a familiar shore appears, rather than using every reserve of energy to flail uselessly about in panic, destroying all possibility of potentially adaptive measures. There is the desire to return to the power of what is known even in the midst of a willful voyage to the unknown, a siren’s song of familiarity slamming shut the door to the new visions that the amorphous reality of limitlessness can invite. But once the idea of treading water is accepted to the point of dictating action, once calm acceptance is allowed to set in, so too does the ocean begin to seem less of an enemy, the mind clears, solutions appear, and direction based on sharpness of thought and intrepid decision takes flight. Previously unthought avenues to understanding open up, and then, new shores. This, then, is the spirit in which the President’s Address and the three plenaries to follow are offered, couple with Paweł Jędrzejko’s fitting examination of Polish literature filtered through an oceanic American literary enounter. Taking America to sea, they are all a compass leading not to what is already known, but to what can be, if we but continue to calmly tread on.

Cyraina Johnson-Roullier
Editor-in-Chief, RIAS

2015-05-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Theme and Subject Matter in Francis Parkman’s The Old Régime in Canada

Edgardo Medeiros da Silva

Language: EN | Published: 15-11-2014 | Abstract

Edgardo Medeiros da Silva
School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Lisbon, University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies

‘There are no political panaceas, except in the imagination of political quacks’. These are the words used by the American historian Francis Parkman (1823–1893) to suggest that the English and French settlements on the North American continent had been quite different from their onset and were quite possibly bound to remain as such in years to come. His History of France and England in North America (1865–1892) provides us with a historical account of the colonization of New France which sheds some light on the colonial beginnings of New England as well. Like all Romantic or literary historians of the time, Parkman had a story to tell, novelistic in style and all-encompassing in theme and subject matter, which in this particular case is as much about France’s status as a colonial power as about England’s. Drawing on part four of his History, entitled the Old Régime in Canada (1874), this paper examines the failure of France to establish the basis of a well-regulated political community in North America in the context of the Anglo-French rivalry for the control of that continent. It aims to determine to what extent Parkman’s historical narrative on New France also gives us an insight into New England’s history; what does it tell us about the political culture of both colonies? and what vision, if any, of America/of the Americas does it offer us?

2014-11-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

‘The World of Made Is Not the World of Born’: America and the Edge of the Continent

Tadeusz Sławek

Language: EN | Published: 01-05-2015 | Abstract

The risk of America’, Tadeusz Slawek writes in the final plenary lecture, ‘is […] America itself—its endless, limitless ambitions […] to know absolutely everything’. These words resonate in important ways with the diagnosis of the contemporary world offered in The Transparency Society by Byung-Chul Han—a German-Korean theorist whose work has only recently begun to appear in English translation. Byung-Chul Han attacks transparency as a contemporary false ideal. The illusion that we can obtain information about everyone and everything—that thanks to technological innovations like the Internet, the world has become transparent—runs counter to the actual impoverishment of our ability to make sense of this wealth of data. We accumulate information, but this does not necessarily mean that our knowledge of the world increases. Through a deft and illuminating reading of poetry by Robinson Jeffers and e. e. cummings, matched by astute references to Norman O. Brown, Jean Luc Nancy, and George Bataille, and others, Sławek traces the poets’ brave struggle against the culture and rhetoric of ‘excess’. Jeffers and cummings, but also D. H. Lawrence, were quick to denounce that America was turning into a ‘world in which everything is “far too”, i.e., a world subjected to human ambition and desire, a world of hasty activism’ where only Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘one hundred percent Americans’ would be welcome. To the nightmarish dream of a panoptical, completely transparent America, Slawek opposes a poetic and cultural tradition that stands firmly opposed to ‘the hubristic desires of the American state to know absolutely everything regardless of civil rights and political and economic costs’.

2015-05-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

The Cultural Logic of America’s Pivot to the Asia-Pacific

Lei Zhang

Language: EN | Published: 15-11-2014 | Abstract

Lei Zhang
Renmin University of China
China

The past few years have witnessed the Obama administration’s rhetoric from ‘return to Asia-Pacific’ to pivoting/rebalancing toward Asia-Pacific’ under which a comprehensive package of political, economic and military moves has been implemented, signifying America’s endeavor to shift its focus from the Middle East to Asia-Pacific. However, the notion of ‘America’s Pacific Century’ by Hillary Clinton and the strategy of ‘America’s Re-balancing toward Asia-Pacific’ evade the persistently long history of America’s dominance in Asia and the Pacific and America’s cultural representation and construction of Asia-Pacific as one region. by reading Obama’s foreign tactics toward Asia-Pacific as literature and tracing the translation of America’s cultural literacy of this region into policy, this paper treats Obama’s pivoting/rebalancing toward Asia-Pacific as a cultural heritage and historical continuity rather than a gravity shift in America’s global strategy. That is, such political trope and actions need to be scrutinized from a historical and cultural perspective and the cultural logic behind deserves a careful examination. To do so, I would examine the hegemonic vision and free-trade imperialism, historically upheld and culturally shaped by America, in the very fashionable’ transpacific project promoted by U.S.-TPP (the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement) in the climate of globalization and transnational capitalism. Also, the discourse of sublimity and American Orientalism should be evaluated in the course of America’s ambitious political engagement and aggressive military deployment in this region. In conclusion, the cultural logic of the current U.S. foreign policy toward Asia-Pacific is inextricable from the Imperialist Imaginary, American Orientalism and American Sublime, all of which but not limited to, render this rebalancing strategy problematic. Rather than dealing with a rising Asia, particularly being anxious about China’s threat, America needs a critical self-reflexive examination of its imperialist culture which has shaped the Asia-Pacific Other and translated into its current foreign policy toward Asia and the Pacific.

2014-11-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Subsuming “America” to the “Global.” A Response to Markha Valenta’s “Abandoning America the Better to Save America”

Giorgio Mariani

Language: EN | Published: 30-06-2017 | Abstract

Giorgio Mariani
Dipartimento di Studi Europei, Americani e Interculturali
Università "Sapienza" di Roma

Subsuming “America” to the “Global.” A Response to Markha Valenta’s “Abandoning America the Better to Save America”

A Response to Markha Valenta’s “Abandoning America the Better to Save America.” (In the present issue of RIAS).

Keywords: transnational turn, American Studies, democracy, internationalization of American Studies, refocusing American studies, globalization

 

2017-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Abandoning America the Better to Save American Studies: A Proposal

Markha Valenta

Language: EN | Published: 30-06-2017 | Abstract

Markha Valenta
Radboud University Nijmegen

Abandoning America the Better to Save American Studies: A Proposal

Abstract: This paper argues that the most fruitful future for American Studies is one that subsumes it to global projects, critical sensibilities, political, intellectual and aesthetic fields greater than itself. Correspondingly, the prime referent of American Studies ought not to be a reified “America” but rather the paradoxes, tensions and contestations between democratic and inhumanely extractive relations that gave birth to and continue to shape the US/Americas, even as their reach and flow far exceed “America.” The US – as icon, social field and political actor – is as much the effect as the source of global forces. The most important of these today are ones that qualify, selectively dissolve, concentrate and reconfigure constitutive elements of the nation-state and political geography. Taking this seriously – as the US follows in the footsteps of other countries that have been producing one chauvinist strongman leader after another – means making American Studies not about either “America” or the US but about the world. One particularly promising avenue entails scholarship engaging and contributing to a radical, globalizing democratic culture that is, in fact, deeply aligned with some of the most important traditions and sensibilities in American Studies itself.

Keywords: Globalization, Democracy, Politics, America, American Studies

2017-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

World Literature and International American Studies: Convergence, Divergence, and Contest

Paul Giles

Language: EN | Published: 30-06-2017 | Abstract

Paul Giles
Department of English
US Studies Centre's International Academic Advisory Committee
University of Sidney

World Literature and International American Studies: Convergence, Divergence, and Contest

Abstract: This paper considers the relation between the institutional formations of World Literature and International American Studies. It compares and contrasts the association between World Literature and Comparative Literature to that between International American Studies and the American Studies movement emerging out of the United States. It goes on to argue that World Literature is anchored to a universalist teleology, one linked historically to an idealist intellectual genealogy. By contrast, International American Studies involves a more materialist, multidirectional emphasis that differentiates it from the U.S. appropriation of globalization to further its own strategic interests.

Keywords: World Literature, Comparative Literature, International American Studies, Globalization

2017-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Blue Water. A Thesis

Bruce Robbins

Language: EN | Published: 01-05-2015 | Abstract

The historical framework that Bruce Robbins draws up for rethinking ‘the newness of the New World as opposed to the oldness of the Old World’ is a cosmopolitan rather than a transatlantic one, though Robbins is concerned not only with cosmopolitanism in space, but in time, too. Moving from a consideration of the political work done by the notoriously bizarre ‘Blue Water Thesis’, according to which only sea-based conquest would count as colonialism, Robbins asks what happens if we do not limit our critical work to studying modern colonialism, but include non-European, pre-modern colonialism into the picture. This is what he means by cosmopolitanism in time—a ‘radical expansion in the time frame’ that inevitably ‘ends up undermining our moralized geographies’. Such unsettling of time-honored historical and moral categories is of course open to the charge of allowing America to forgive itself for its empire building, which considered on a much larger time scale, may appear just as bloody and immoral as older, non-American and non-European imperialisms. On the other hand, this might be a risk worth taking. Rethinking America in a much longer unit of time is a way to escape from the grips of American exceptionalism, and a way to remind ourselves that America may not be ‘meant to be the glory and instructor of the world’.

2015-05-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

“Things Change but the Amerecano Is Here to Stay”: America in Italian Popular Movies of the 1980s

Sostene M. Zangari

Language: EN | Published: 30-11-2013 | Abstract

Sostene M. Zangari
University of Milan
Italy

“Things Change but the Amerecano Is Here to Stay”:
America in Italian Popular Movies of the 1980s

The article focuses on a number of film comedies of the early 1980s. In different ways, the movies rearticulate the relationship between Italy and the United States. In showing how Italians can beat Americans at sports, how they can indulge in conspicuous consumption and finally how even the United States are not alien to provincialism and backwardness, these movies express a new mood of confidence that was widely felt in Italian society at the time. However, these movies came at a moment when the Italian film industry was on the verge of its decline. Starting from the 1980s, in fact, American movies and distributors would colonize the Italian movie market and depress the Italian movie industry.

2013-11-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

The Canvas and the Maze: Deconstructing Wall and Frontier in Contemporary American Science Fiction

Chiara Grilli

Language: EN | Published: 30-12-2018 | Abstract


Chiara Grilli
Independent scholar
Italy

The Canvas and the Maze: Deconstructing Wall and Frontier in Contemporary American Science Fiction

Abstract: Science Fiction has always been used to analyze society through the construction of parallel worlds. Likewise, Denis Villeneuve’s movie Arrival (2016) and the TV series Westworld (2016) challenge respectively the evocative symbol of the wall and the old myth of the American frontier, thanks to the fruitful possibilities of representation offered by the Sci-Fi  genre. While in Arrival the wall is turned into the first tool of communication between two cultures, in Westworld the myth depicting America as the land of opportunity connects with that of the frontier and the search for new lands, intended here not as outdoor places, but more importantly as inner spaces. Beside their mystifying power, what connects these two works is a more complex concept of time and of identity: thanks to the screen and the maze, and, as a consequence, thanks to interrelation and introspection, the self is allowed to wander through time, through visionary predictions of the future and hallucinatory mirages of the past, which give the individual the chance to re-build his/her own life story.

Keywords: Science Fiction, Wall, American frontier

2018-12-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

United by the Ocean? The Romantic Conan Doyle and the Transatlantic Sherlock Holmes

Jacek Mydla

Language: EN | Published: 15-05-2014 | Abstract

Jacek Mydla

Department of Literary and Cultural Theory, Institute of English Cultures and Literatures, University of Silesia

Biographers  describe  Sir  Arthur  Conan  Doyle  as  a  ‘Briton enchanted by America’. His letter ‘England and America’ has been  called  a  ‘plea  for  Britons  to  understand  the  American  point  of  view’.  ACD  entertained  utopian  (which  is  not to  say, silly) ideas about the English-speaking part of the world, which made him make efforts to overcome mutual prejudices and to bring the English and the American nations together in terms of friendship. This despite the fact that he had reasons to feel sore due to literary piracies committed against him by American publishers. ACD’s  fascination  with  merica—which  was  for  him, in his own words, a land ‘full of romance’ shows in his greatest and enduring literary achievement: the Sherlock Holmes stories. Already the first of them, ‘A Study in Scarlet’, which in 1887 gave literary life to the now world-famous consulting detective, is set for a significant part of the plot in the U.S. But  ‘transatlantic’  motifs  occur  also  in  other  stories,  most famously in ‘The Five Orange Pips’ (1891), ‘The Yellow Face’ (1893), and ‘The Dancing Men’ (1903). Besides this, a number of other stories contain the motifs and tropes of sea/ocean/voyaging as leading ones, e.g. The story with a ‘whaling’ motif: ‘The Black Peter’.For  ACD  America  was  a  land  on  which  he  projected, as the ‘American’ and ‘voyaging’ stories make evident, his major political and ideological concerns, such as those with justice and equality. In the paper, special attention is paid to the way in which in some of the stories the ocean (also: a sea and a river) features as something like a protagonist, even as one who administers justice and settles other types of account.

2014-05-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Children and Youth: Disadvantaged and Disenfranchised by the Current U.S. Immigration Regime

Marietta Messmer

Language: EN | Published: 30-12-2018 | Abstract

Marietta Messmer
University of Groningen
the Netherlands

Children and Youth: Disadvantaged and Disenfranchised by the Current U.S. Immigration Regime 

Abstract: Focusing on undocumented immigrant children who were brought to the US by their parents at a young age (the so-called 1.5 generation) and US citizen children living in irregular or mixed-status immigrant families, this essay argues that the current US immigration regime is too strongly adult-centered and in this way not only systematically disenfranchises immigrant children but also structurally disadvantages US citizen children living with at least one undocumented parent because the parent’s irregular status in practice tends to extinguish the child’s citizen status. Analyzing the US’s current immigration regime through the lens of under-age youth can thus function as an enabling prism to highlight the extent to which current US immigration laws and policies collide with both national and international legal practices and produce inherently contradictory or paradoxical situations; it can throw into relief the extent to which children (even US citizen children) lack sufficient agency and voice in current US immigration law; and it can foreground the deleterious consequences of the current immigration regime’s prioritization of deterrence and deportation for one of the most vulnerable segments of the US population for whom not even DACA can provide sufficient protection.

2018-12-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

From the American Wild West to Bojszowy: Józef Kłyk’s Westerns as Social Rituals

Jolanta Szymkowska-Bartyzel

Language: EN | Published: 15-05-2014 | Abstract

Jolanta Szymkowska-Bartyzel

Institute of American Studies and Polish Diaspora of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland.

Józef Kłyk is an over 60 year old amateur film maker from Silesia region of Poland who for over 30 years has directed over 50 westerns. All his western movies are made with 16mm Russian camera and the shooting is done on location in or near the village of Bojszowo, with the use of local people as actors and film crew Kłyk’s films are a premier on the icons and symbols of the American Wild West: cowboys, Indians, saloons and  ‘Wanted  ‘signs.  In  his  film  stories  the  Author  invokes the history of the American West and the history of Silesian villagers who in 1854 left for Texas and founded Panna Maria. The paper aims to examine the incorporation of the concept  of  this  classical  American  film  genre  with  its  main distinguishing  features  in  amateur  production  of  the  Polish director. It will focus on the ritual character of the genre movie and demonstrate how Kłyk’s western production is used by local community of the village of Bojszowo for ritual  purposes.  Reconstruction  of  village and rebuilding the history of Polish emigrants in Panna Maria within the form of film genre serve basic social function of expressing, fixing and reinforcing the shared values and beliefs of a community.

2014-05-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

America Unbound: Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies by Antonio Barrenechea (A Book Review)

Juliana Nalerio

Language: EN | Published: 30-06-2018 | Abstract

Juliana Nalerio's review of America Unbound: Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies by Antonio Barrenechea (U of New Mexico P, 2016), 247 pages. 
ISBN-10: 082635758X
ISBN-13: 978-0826357588

2018-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

The Uruguay River: A Permeable Border in South America

a permeable border in South America

Eunice Nodari , Marcos Gerhardt

Language: EN | Published: 30-09-2021 | Abstract | pp. 201-227

The Uruguay River basin in South America has held a social, cultural, environmental, and economic relevance for many centuries. The river flows for about 2,000 km, linked to an important remnant of native forest, the Selva Misionera in Argentina, and to a Brazilian conservation unit for biodiversity, the Turvo State Park. The Uruguay River is fed by several other important rivers, forming a basin region in which thousands of people live and work. The history of the Uruguay River is intensively linked to the permeable borders between Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay where different social groups circulated in diverse historical time periods. Forests along the river played a very important role with emphasis on the extraction and trade of yerba mate (Ilex paraguariensis, Saint-Hilaire), a forest product widely consumed in southern America, and also the timber extraction from native forests, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a result, a profound socio-environmental transformation took place with the reconstruction of regional landscapes shaped by the Uruguay River basin.

2021-09-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

"Believe and tremble": A Note on Margaret Fuller's Roman Revolution

John Matteson

Language: EN | Published: 30-11-2017 | Abstract

John Matteson
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
City University of New York
USA

“Believe and tremble”: A Note on Margaret Fuller’s Roman Revolution

Abstract: 1848, Europe’s year of revolutions, was also a revolutionary moment in the United States, for it witnessed the holding of the Seneca Falls Convention, the first formal gathering for the purpose of discussing the social and civil rights of women in America. A significant step on the road to Seneca Falls had taken place three years earlier when Margaret Fuller, the former editor of Emerson’s literary magazine The Dial, published Woman in the Nineteenth Century, an erudite and impassioned plea for female equality that had no precedent in American letters. Yet when the pioneering band of feminists gathered to ratify its Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls, Fuller was thousands of miles away. The revolutionary movement to which she devoted her heart and toil that year was not the cause of American feminism, but the democratic revolution in Rome.

2017-11-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

La novela histórica hispanoamericana  y la reescritura de la historia: Navegantes, historia y escrituras en Vigilia del Almirante de Augusto Roa Bastos

Fabián Gabriel Mossello

Language: EN | Published: 15-11-2015 | Abstract

Spanish-American Historical Novel and the Rewriting of History.
Seafarers, History and Writing in Vigil of the Admiral
by Augusto Roa Bastos
The historical novel in Latin America has contributed much to Latin American historiography. Beginning with the earliest writings by chroniclers, conquistadors and priests, writing has served to comment on the reality of our American world: a world of immense complexity, both in terms of materiality of existence and of intellectual life. The article addresses this complexity with reference to a particular historical novel: Vigil of the Admiral (1992) by the Paraguayan writer Augusto Roa Bastos. The novel offers a rereading of the life of Christopher Columbus, in which the latter’s biography is presented as an alternative version of that adopted by official historiography. The writer highlights scenes of Columbus’s intimate life and populates the narrative with his thoughts, his obsessions, fears and visions of the future in the crucial historical moment when the relationship between the New and the Old Worlds becomes defined.

2015-11-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Introduction

Agnieszka Woźniakowska , Anna Łakowicz-Dopiera

Language: EN | Published: 15-05-2014 | Abstract

For three summer days in August 2013 the International American Studies Association managed to attract scholars of all continents to travel to a Polish harbor town—Szczecin to contribute to the discussions on America(s) separated from other continents by two oceans. The title 'Oceans Apart' turned out to be an intellectual provocation which proved that the oceanic separateness was illusory as the discussions oscillated around the topics which were recognized and resonant in distant parts of the world. As the organizers intended, the speakers searched for new words to give meanings to old texts. The works of authors such as Herman Melville, Pearl Buck, Jack London, or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle inspired scholars to ask questions pertaining to the complexity of human nature and served as referential points in debates on other more modern texts. The old problems of exclusion, prejudice or stereotyping found new exemplification both in literature and in geopolitical observations. The oceanic metaphors and associations triggered a wide range of topics and multiple ways of interpreting them, thus proving that the oceans connect rather than divide people.

The present issue addresses topics related to the notion of the ocean in two ways: those which concern issues outside of the world of literature and those which refer to specific literary texts.

The first paper selected for this issue has been written by Regina Schober and is entitled ‘The World Wide Sea—Oceanic Metaphors, Concepts of Knowledge, and Transnational America in the Information Age’. Professor Schober received for this article the 2013 Emory Elliot Award, the award given to an outstanding paper submitted for an IASA conference. The second text, ‘History as an ocean’ written by Alicja Bemben, investigates the question of what history is and it discusses the relation between history and literature. It is followed by Jolanta Szymkowska’s text ‘From the American Wild West to Bojszowy: Józef Kłyk’s Westerns as Social Rituals’ in which the author examines the extent to which the American film genre influenced the western production of Silesian amateur director, and discusses the ritual purposes of Józef Kłyk’s productions.

The three articles are followed by papers in which the ocean metaphor is directly related to literary texts. Thus Justyna Fruzińska discusses the process of maturation of young men in relation to three fictional characters: Jack London’s Humphrey Van Weyden in The Sea Wolf, Herman Melville’s Captain Amasa Delano from ‘Benito Cereno’ and eponymous Billy Budd, and their experiences on the sea. Pilar Martínez Benedí, in ‘Revolving the Vortex; or, Working through Trauma at Sea’ also addresses Hermann Melville’s work, Moby Dick, by attempting to examine relationship between a sea-vortex and the experience of working through trauma. Claudia Ioana Doroholschi’s text is a comparative study of Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat and S.T. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Jacek Mydla’s ‘United by the Ocean? The Romantic Conan Doyle and the Transatlantic Sherlock Holmes’ focuses on how the metaphor of the ocean/water functions in Doyle’s story “The Five Orange Pips.” Valeria Gennero’s text ‘Pearl S. Buck and the Forgotten Holocaust of the Two-Ocean War’ discusses the notions of ‘national identity’ and ‘gendered violence’ in the context of Buck’s novel Dragon Seed. In the last article Hitomi Nabae examines the representation of Creole culture in Lafcadio Hearn’s writings.

Anna Łakowicz-Dopiera and Agnieszka Woźniakowska

2014-05-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Introduction

Virginia R. Dominguez

Language: EN | Published: 30-06-2018 | Abstract

Virginia R. Dominguez
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
USA

Walls, Material and Rhetorical:
Past, Present, and Future

Abstract: An introduction to this special issue of RIAS on walls, in light of President Trump’s proposal to build a tall and beautiful wall along the US-Mexico border and the multiple concerns it raises, this essay, like this issue of RIAS as a whole, provides comparative background on walls built at different times in the past and in different locations around the world, exploring their intended efficacy and questionable results, their transformation over time into sites of tourism, uncertain peace, and unstable truces.  Raising questions about both rhetoric and materiality, it suggests that the matter does not just concern Trump’s views and policies but, rather, much more general views in the US toward Mexico and Mexicans. The essay raises the specters of both racism and imperialism in the rhetoric and proposals coming from the White House, and it seeks to use contributions from scholars in Italy, Israel, Mexico, the U.S., Hungary, South Korea, Denmark, and Canada to put it all in broader perspective.

Keywords: Trump’s proposed wall, introduction, rhetoric, polls, comparisons

2018-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

El Canal de Panamá  en el desarrollo marítimo  de las Américas

Carlos Gabriel Argüelles Arredondo

Language: EN | Published: 15-11-2015 | Abstract

The Panama Canal in the Maritime Development of the Americas

The Panama Canal is one of the greatest engineering projects that man has ever undertaken in history. Throughout the period of three hundred years, many ideas concerning the prospect of joining two great oceans, and thus to change the geopolitics of the planet, were presented; many attempts at the implementation of the project and attempts were made, and thus the history of the Panama Canal is a history story of numerous failures leading to an ultimate success. With the opening of the Canal, strategic transformations in the area of politics, economy and trade have taken place world-wide. Directly or indirectly related to the opening of the Canal was also the significant shift of attention in the international approach to the regulation of the principles concerning the use waterways, which led to agreements and treaties signed to improve world trade with the view to the advancement of the inter-American and international community.

2015-11-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Revolving the Vortex; or, Working through Trauma at Sea

Pilar Martínez Benedí

Language: EN | Published: 15-05-2014 | Abstract

Pilar Martinez Benedi

Università di Roma ‘Sapienza’, Italy

Even  as  sea  writing  in  antebellum  America  might  have aspired  to  literary  exploration—and  possession,  the  ocean, as  Hester  Blum  has  noted,  is  a  ‘landscape  than  cannot  be tangibly possessed’. The of its waters gives the sea a formless, elusive quality, and its apparently material surface hides unfathomable and ultimately ungraspable depths. The view from the masthead, moreover, offered sailors a vast barren, monotonous panorama: rather than discovery, this vantage point showed nothing—only watery emptiness. On the other hand, sea voyages were inherently circular—they ended where they had started. Whaling voyages, in particular, were non-linear and non-teleological. Or, rather, their elos—the whale—was in  perpetual  motion,  and  the  whaleship  circumnavigated the slippery oceanic landscape in his chase.The concern with how these ontological features of seafaring reflect, and are reflected by, the epistemology of sea narratives  will  broadly  frame  my  paper.  In  particular,  I  propose to look at the final vortex in Moby-Dick as an image that happily captures these aspects of seafaring—and of sea writing: elusiveness and circuitousness, and, at once, to point at how such aspects, and their blending, eloquently embody psychic trauma. A sea vortex—‘a circular movement of water with  a  vacuum  at  the  center’,  in  Paul  Brotdkorb’s  words—echoes the spiral-like experience of working-through trauma; the ceaseless revolving around an event that cannot be known, since it was not grasped as it occurred, according to Cathy Caruth’s formulation. In turn, I will contend, this vortical image is an apt trope for Moby-Dick’s own circuitous form, visually replicating  the  convoluted  process  of  working  through  its narrator’s trauma. Therefore, I will explore the ways in which, in  his  meandering,  digressive  tale,  Ishmael—and,  with  him, the reader—seems to be revolving the vortex in order to gain mastery over the unclaimed experience of his lonely survival.

2014-05-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Latin America in Focus

German A. Duarte , Justin Michael Battin

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2022 | Abstract | pp. 19-23

A key distinction of Review of International American Studies is its commitment to the notion that the Americas are a hemispheric and transoceanic communicating vessel. This angle provides a unique path to de-center the American Studies discipline, which has become tantamount to studies of the United States. This angle also expands the discipline beyond its traditional literary roots, inviting critical investigations into other forms of communicative media, such as cinema, television, and photography. Informed and inspired by this conceptualization of the discipline, this issue of RIAS is composed of several pieces specifically focused on Latin America, each of which employs a unique interpretive approach of visual media to, collectively and comprehensively, articulate how this multilayered cultural landscape manifests in our contemporary social imaginary.

The arbitrary delineation of the globe through the notion of ‘the western world’ has, seemingly, transformed the Latin American continent a no man’s land. In its vast extension, this part of the planet seems condemned to exist between two worlds. Despite being part of the western hemisphere, and despite its deep Catholic tradition, this vast region is surprisingly excluded as a member of ‘the west.’ Yet, it was neither placed in ‘the east,’ nor on the other side of the wall, when the world was politically, culturally, and economically divided by the Iron Curtain. This land’s perpetual homelessness might be due to its consistent political instability, to the weakness of some of its democracies, or even its colonial past, one that bears no relation to the Commonwealth of Britain, a belonging that placed Australia in the topos of the West. These reasons, in addition to others, have fostered an understanding of Latin America as being generally alien to the ‘western world.’

Being a no man’s land, deprived of a hemisphere, and broadly unintelligible by the general imaginary of the western cultural industry, this continent, populated by almost 700-million people, was traditionally subjected to stereotypes formulated during the twentieth century, and that remained unchangeable in this new millennium. Latin America has become, for the global imaginary, a place of military juntas, a vast lowland displaying desertic features, a tropical yet savage jungle, a poverty-stricken favela, and a land fought over by romantic revolutionarios.

Certainly, the question remains if the obsolete model ‘western world,’ the also obsolete ‘third world,’ or ‘periphery,’ and even the in vogue ‘global south’ would be able to embrace and reproduce a closer image of this heterogenous and vast continent, and by extension if this generalization is able to denote a set of multiple series of social diversities. We doubt it. This doubt encouraged us to gather diverse scholars from diverse academic disciplines to contribute to this issue of Review of International American Studies. And this doubt, which was at a first glance only intuitive, brough us to avoid the topic of identity and representation as the main theme for this journal’s issue. Our initial plan was to structure the series of contributions on some problematics relating to the photographic medium, a medium that is widely regarded as exerting an objective representation of reality, yet also places the pictorial representation on an undetermined semiotic field. The choice of photography was also a choice of intuition that we quickly abandoned since, in our twenty-first century mediascape, photography represents only one element of a fast and global visual stream that shapes and refashions the collective imaginary of the Latin American continent. Thus, we expanded our scope to include other media such as films, paintings, and any visual-oriented human expression that could provide insights on the complex and chaotic mechanism that formulates and constructs the imaginary on the turbulent entity that we call society. 

2022-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

The Limitations of Theory: A Response to Ulrich Reichardt’s “Theories of the global, Global Literature, and American Literature in a Globalizing Age”

Marina Camboni

Language: EN | Published: 30-06-2017 | Abstract

Marina Camboni
Dipartimento di Lingue Mediazione Lettere Filosofia
Studi Umanistici
UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI MACERATA

The Limitations of Theory: A Response to Ulrich Reichardt’s “Theories of the global, Global Literature, and American Literature in a Globalizing Age”

A Response to Ulrich Reichardt’s “Theories of the global, Global Literature, and American Literature in a Globalizing Age.” (In the present issue of RIAS).

Keywords: Limitations of theory, globalization, global literature, American literature

2017-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

The World Wide Sea: Oceanic Metaphors, Concepts of Knowledge and Transnational America in the Information Age

Regina Schober

Language: EN | Published: 15-05-2014 | Abstract

‘I have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans’, Ishmael declares in Moby Dick, comparing the accumulation of knowledge to traveling the vast and boundless space of the sea. The ocean has always been related to human curiosity as well as anxiety towards (yet) unknown terrains, reflecting the restless desire to travel, explore, and seek the ‘truth’. As Elizabeth Bishop notes, the sea ‘is like what we imagine knowledge to be, dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn’. In view of the massive proliferation of information and knowledge in the digital age, it is thus not surprising that the sea has become one of the leading metaphors for the Internet, the mythical space in which knowledge is stored, generated, and from which it emerges. Whether we navigate or surf on the World Wide Web, whether we immerse in data flows, or participate in swarm intelligence, nautical/sea imagery has been central in conceptualizing the Internet from the beginning on, suggesting notions of openness, infinity, shapelessness as well as creativity, diversity, and fluidity. In my paper I will investigate the cultural and ideological functions of sea imagery in relation to new digital information technology, as manifest in American literature and culture, accounting for ascriptions of the Internet as a ‘particularly American technology’. From the creation of the term ‘cyberspace’ (cyber =Greek for steersman) in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), to the crowdsourced YouTube film collaboration Life in a Day (2011) with its extensive sea imagery to Google’s recent underwater mapping project ‘SeaView’, I seek to unravel the diverse web of connotations, implications, and allusions at play in conceptualizing the Internet in relation to maritime imagery. Against the backdrop of traditional concepts and models of knowledge, I thus intend to explore the heuristic potential and cultural propositions of the sea metaphor in America’s creative engagement and critical negotiation with the new worlds of the ‘Information Age’, taking into consideration its transnational and potentially posthuman future.

2014-05-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

A.K. Ramanujan’s Insightful Observations on Various Aspects of the United States of America. Looking Briefly at the Diary Entries

Jolly Das

Language: EN | Published: 27-06-2024 | Abstract | pp. 87-103

Attipat Krishnaswamy Ramanujan (16 March 1929-13 July 1993) travelled extensively in peninsular India, collecting folktales from rural regions. Since he was already on the move, as a folklorist and as a teacher who taught in several colleges in South India consecutively, it wasn’t difficult for him to set sail for the United States of America when he received the Fulbright Travel Fellowship and Smith-Mundt Grant in 1959, to continue with his studies in linguistics. On 1 July 1959 he boarded the Strathaird in Bombay and undertook a land-journey through France to reach Southampton where he boarded the SS Queen Elizabeth which took him to New York on 28 July 1959. He wrote about experiences and observations during this journey in his “Travel Diary, 2 to 27 July 1959, Bombay to New York”, in the anthology Journeys: A Poet’s Diary (2018).  The first-ever travel overseas, to the US, was full of excitement and anxiety for the young man of thirty. This journey was the initiation for his passage to the country he was to inhabit for the rest of his life, as a teacher in the University of Chicago—a transition from the familiar world (his interior landscape, akam) to the unfamiliar country (the world outside his self, the puram). The article shall focus on Journeys: A Poet’s Diary and A.K. Ramanujan’s unpublished diary to explore his observations and experiences of life in the US. These reveal the way in which his inner self met the new space he entered, followed by his expressing, through his creative and critical self, the interface and intermingling of the two. These travel writings go beyond mere records of observations—they are cultural artifacts left behind by a truly transnational traveler — as a man from a South-Indian milieu; who had been exposed to the British system of education; who was exceptionally intelligent, a poet and critic; and, a keen observer. Theories which engage with the akam-puram paradigm, environment (Buel), culture in a liquid modern world (Bauman) and cosmopolitanism (Appiah) shall be used as tools to analyse and assess the select texts.

 

2024-06-27



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Unpredictable Americas: Resignifying Americanness Under a Relational Perspective

Zilá Bernd

Language: EN | Published: 15-11-2016 | Abstract

Zilá Bernd

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
Centro Universitário La Salle
Brazil

Unpredictable Americas: Resignifying Americanness Under a Relational Perspective

Abstract: This presentation is a reflection originating in the representation of the Americas in its first iconographies (Marten de Vos, Jan van der Straet), from which a cultural hierarchical principle installed itself in detriment of the American culture. For five hundred years since the “discovery” of America we have been invested in deconstructing this feeling of supposed cultural dependence. The most successful strategy has been the search for a long memory, not in Europe, but in the native cultures, and that points to transcultural practices, initiated in the first centuries after the conquest when the Guarani reproduced models from the European baroque in sculptures with altered skin color, eye shape and ornaments. Oswald de Andrade and Edouard Glissant introduce us into the search for our own ancestry in indigenous and creole cultures. The notion of Americaness, far from proposing the existence of a large homogenous narrative, tries to analyze dislocations, re-semantization of myths throughout the three Americas and the task of reappropriation characteristic of American cultures beyond narrow notions of nationality. To think Americanness as a heterogeneous construct implies leaving aside binaries such as civilization/barbarism or center/periphery in favor of including the diverse and the excluded third. In keeping with recent work such as that of Patrick Imbert, we count on the implosion of polarized thinking, on transnational exchanges and the natural disposition to the relational and transcultural encounters which will favor processes of reconstellation of the Americas.

Keywords: Americanness. Long Memory. Transcultural Practices. Re-semantization. Reconstellation.

2016-11-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Sicily, Not Italy

Claudio Salmeri

Language: EN | Published: 30-11-2017 | Abstract

Claudio Salmeri
Faculty of Philology
University of Silesia in Katowice

Sicily, Not Italy

Abstract: Since the American continent became a part of the European imagination, it has always been seen to represent freedom. Especially after 1776, when the American democratic “experiment” giving rise to the United States proved durable, America became a source of social and political inspiration to generations of Europeans and non-Europeans alike. Unsurprisingly, also in the Italian context, the catalog of ways in which American values have been “translated into Italian” and adapted to Italy’s cultural space seems to be ever-growing. Yet, even though the cultural transfer dates back to Christopher Columbus, it is especially since the outbreak of World War II that Italy has been markedly influenced by intellectual and material values generated in the US. At some point, the fascination with the US soared to such a level that, incredibly as it may sound, one of the most iconic provinces of Italy would begin to imagine itself as the forty-ninth state of the US long before Alaska and Hawaii gained their present-day status: in Sicily, the American fascination seems never to abate.

2017-11-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Creolization in Lafcadio Hearn’s New Orleans and Martinique Writings

Hitomi Nakamura Nabae

Language: EN | Published: 15-05-2014 | Abstract

Hitomi Nabae

Kobe City University of Foreign Studies

The word tsunami, now commonly used throughout the world, was, according to the OED, first used in the 1897 story ‘A Living  God’  written  by  Lafcadio  Hearn.  He  wrote  this  story in Japan soon after reading the breaking news about the tsunami  that  had  killed  more  than  20,000  people  in  North Japan. Having been trained as a journalist for twenty years in America, it was no wonder that he responded so quickly to such a catastrophe. Moreover, his first novel was also about oceanic catastrophe: a decade earlier in New Orleans he had written Chita, a story about the Gulf storm of 1856 which had swept away a resort island and swallowed up its inhabitants and  vacationers.  While  Hearn  obviously  utilizes  the  catastrophe  to  dramatize  the  miraculous  moment  of  survival, he also experiments with his narrative voice to render reality more powerfully. These two stories of oceanic catastrophe well illustrate how he turns journalistic realism into legendary myth by framing it within cross-cultural allegories, which arguably is an essential technique that he consciously crafted and developed so as to effectively address the multi-cultural readers of the world.

2014-05-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Onondaga Lake as Sacred Space and Contested Space

Holly Anne Rine

Language: EN | Published: 28-08-2023 | Abstract | pp. 187-221

Onondaga Lake, located in what is now Central New York, is the sacred place of the founding of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. It is where the Peacemaker paddled his stone canoe and established the Great Law of Peace that has stood for centuries. In 1654 Simon Le Moyne, S. J. arrived on the shores of Onondaga Lake. In 1656 the French government, in accordance with the Christian Doctrine of Discovery, granted the Jesuits rights to the lake and the surrounding land, much prized for its abundant salt springs. They built a mission to lay claim to both the land and the souls who occupied it. It is this moment that sets off the contest for control of the lake and the history. The lake remains the sacred center of the Confederacy, which has survived despite attempts to eradicate it. The future of both is dependent on the recognition of its sacred status by those who have seen the lake as a source of profit and power as well as a convenient dumping ground. This is the story of that struggle.

2023-08-28



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Re-signifying “Asia” in the Transnational Turn of Asian/American Studies

Chien-Ting Lin

Language: EN | Published: 15-11-2016 | Abstract

Chien-Ting Lin
 Re-signifying “Asia” in the Transnational Turn of Asian/American Studies

Abstract

Bringing inter-Asia cultural studies into conversation with Asian American critique, this paper aims to reframe the critical analysis of the scattered hegemonies of US imperialism in articulating the transpacific historical interconnections. Rather than privileging the US as a primary site of investigation and critique, I draw careful attention to the Cold War conditions of inter-Asia migration as an entry point for discussing how the geopolitics of Taiwanese modernity, from the Cold War up to neoliberal globalization, are inextricably linked to Japanese colonialism, US militarism and modernization, and Chinese globalization. To develop my theoretical and historical (re)conceptualization of “Asia” in Asian/American studies, I look at how the migrant narrative of migrant workers in the nonfiction novel Our Stories speaks to the power dynamics of the US Cold War involvement in Asia, neoliberal globalization, and Taiwan subimperialist relations with its neighboring countries. Whereas Asian American cultural critique offers a new analytics to enable a reconceptualization of Asian America without confining it to an identitarian category, inter-Asia cultural studies redirect critical attention to the historical undercurrents of inter-Asia geopolitics that are largely obscured by the dominant knowledge paradigm of the US Cold War politics in the regions of Asia Pacific.

2016-11-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Love, Labor, and Loss: The Trans-Atlantic Homelessness of James Baldwin

John T. Matteson

Language: EN | Published: 29-12-2023 | Abstract | pp. 29-52

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.

2023-12-29



Journal: Review of International American Studies

The Quintessence of the Quintessential

Cyraina Johnson-Roullier

Language: EN | Published: 15-11-2016 | Abstract

The Quintessence of the Quintessential

Let us imagine, for a moment, that we have become characters in our own Robinsonade (in a time long before Daniel Defoe chronicled Robinson Crusoe’s epic journey).  Engaged in a half-magical, early Renaissance exploratory endeavor, like so many others before us, we set out full of hope into uncharted waters in a well-provisioned ship, certain that our quest will end in the success we seek, the discovery of heretofore unknown lands, full of untold riches that will be ours for the taking.  Fuelled by an uncommon mixture of hope, desire and determination, we rush headlong into the indiscernible future, filled with visions of the life of gods we will lead upon our successful return, heavily laden with the wealth of our exploits.  But it is, unfortunately, not to be: not long into our journey, we are beset by a raging storm, whose almost demoniac power shatters our ship—and our hopes—to bits, a situation from which we only just barely escape with our lives.  The intangible imagined life of gods that was ours just a few hours before is brutally and abruptly transformed, now finding objective reality in the shards of our ship washing up on the hated shore that we were in fact blessed to find, though tortured by the painful realization that it is nothing like the shore we had hoped, imagined or sought to find. The storm having dealt with our clothing in much the same way as it did our ship, thus presenting us with an unaccustomed physical reality of near nakedness, this new shore, previously unknown to our imaginations, greets us with an immediate inhospitability that finishes the job by also stripping us figuratively bare, leaving us completely naked to our own understanding as well.  We are shipwrecked—castaways—most definitely not gods, lacking now not only the force that imagined a potential god-like existence, but the hope it generated.  Of determination, however, we must put that to good use, and quickly.  Life now takes on a very different quality, one of a more stark contact with the laws of nature than ever we have felt before.  We are hot, we are hungry, we are cold, wet, exposed, and excoriated by the wind, whose fingers, gentle or sharp like claws, are a constant presence.  Life is now raw existence, and in that existence, we grasp only the enormity of the sea and its deep mystery, the enormity of the heavens, its broiling sun by day and its shimmering stars at night, and the thankful—or thankless—certainty of land underfoot.      

It is at this  juncture that we may most fruitfully encounter the essays contained in this issue of the Review of International American Studies, which highlights several works from the 7^th World Congress of the International American Studies Association, held in conjunction with the American Studies Association of Korea’s 50^th International Conference in Seoul, South Korea, August 17–19, 2015.  The conference theme, “Constellating Americas,” seeks a more complex international engagement in the field of American Studies, one that would foster a greater de-centering of the US within the field than even the inherently international approach of transnationalism has up to the present accomplished.  By borrowing Walter Benjamin’s notion of the constellation as a theoretical construct allowing for a different way of thinking about the interrelationships between the US and other instances of America within American Studies, the emphases of the conference bring about a radical shift in the field imaginary, pointing to both a horizontal and a vertical path toward greater interrelational understanding, the one reaching outward in space, the other in time.
[read more in the Ed/Note inside] 

2016-11-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Treading the Battlefields of Memory: “Vietnam” and “America” Fifty Years After

Justin Michael Battin , Giacomo Traina

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2025 | Abstract | pp. 27-35

Marking fifty years since the Fall/Liberation of Saigon, this issue of Review of International American Studies revisits the intertwined histories and memories of “Vietnam” and “America” through the lens of literature, visual culture, and transnational exchange. The introduction reflects on the enduring resonance of Hubert van Es’s 1975 rooftop photograph—an image that has come to symbolize both the end of the Vietnam War and the beginning of a global struggle over its remembrance. As state-sanctioned and diasporic narratives continue to diverge, Vietnam’s postwar landscape and its global diaspora reveal competing modes of memorialization: triumph and loss, exile and belonging, ideology and affect. The featured contributions trace how writers and artists—among them Marcelino Truong, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Lan Cao, and Viet Thanh Nguyen—reconfigure these contested memories through narrative, philosophy, and art. The issue underscores how the “American War” must be reframed as a Vietnamese and transnational experience, extending beyond national or temporal boundaries. Engaging with the “transnational turn” in American Studies (Fishkin 2004), it argues that the afterlives of the war persist in literature’s ongoing negotiation of trauma, identity, and reconciliation—revealing “Vietnam” and “America” as interwoven cultural constructs on the ever-shifting battlefields of memory.

2025-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Luciano Curreri and Michel Delville, Il grande ‘Incubo che mi son scelto.’ Prove di avvicinamento a Profondo Rosso (1975-2015)

Daniele Pomilio

Language: EN | Published: 30-11-2017 | Abstract

Daniele Pomilio
University of Udine
Italy

Luciano Curreri e Michel Delville, Il grande ‘Incubo che mi son scelto.’ Prove di avvicinamento a Profondo Rosso (1975-2015), Piombino, Edizioni Il Foglio, 2015

The text offers a review of Il grande “Incubo che mi son scelto” - a collection of essays written in three different languages by a group of international scholars to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Profondo Rosso, the cult movie by Dario Argento. The book contributes to the canonization of an Italian classic long neglected by those critics who still consider horror movies a low-rated subgenre comparable to B-movies.

2017-11-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

“Down Beside where the Waters Flow": Reclaiming Rivers for American Studies (Introduction)

Manlio Della Marca , Uwe Lübken

Language: EN | Published: 30-09-2021 | Abstract | pp. 13-24

Over the past three decades, rivers have become a fascinating and popular subject of scholarly interest, not only in the field of environmental history, where river histories have developed into a distinct subgenre, but also in the emerging field of environmental humanities. In this scholarship, rivers have often been reconceptualized as socio-natural sites where human and non-human actors interact with the natural world, generating complex legacies, path dependencies, and feedback loops. Furthermore, rivers have been described as hybrid “organic machines,” whose energy has been utilized by humans in many different ways, including the harvesting of both hydropower and salmon. Indeed, as several environmental historians have noted, in many regions of the world, watercourses have been transformed by technology to such an extent that they increasingly resemble enviro-technical assemblages rather than natural waterways. Rivers have also been discussed through the lens of “eco-biography,” a term coined by Mark Cioc in his influential monograph on the Rhine River, a book informed by “the notion that a river is a biological entity—that it has a ‘life’ and ‘a personality’ and therefore a ‘biography’.” Quite surprisingly, despite this “river turn” (to use Evenden's phrase), rivers have played a marginal role in recent American Studies scholarship. To address this gap, this issue of RIAS brings together scholars from different disciplines, countries, and continents to analyze a wide variety of river experiences, histories, and representations across the American hemisphere and beyond. Hence the title of this volume, Rivers of the Americas, should be seen as both an allusion to the Rivers of America book series (a popular series of sixty-five volumes, each on a particular US river, published between 1937 and 1974) and as a reminder of the still untapped potential of hemispheric, transnational, and comparative modes of critical engagement with rivers in American Studies.

2021-09-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Mailer, Doctorow, Roth. A Cross-Generational Reading of the American Berserk

John Matteson

Language: EN | Published: 16-08-2020 | Abstract | pp. 53-74

Of all American paradoxes, none is greater than this: that the typical American cherishes free speech but is almost mortally offended by public protest, which he regards as at best lacking in taste and at worst an outright crime. A nation founded on dissent, America is exquisitely uncomfortable with ill-mannered disagreement. More than freedom itself, an American is likely to value moral insularity and absolution: he wants to live his life free from ethical challenge. He seeks suburban anesthesia, a life of commercial abundance untroubled by the pain inflicted elsewhere to maintain it, whether through military aggression or the global exploitation of labor. The American hopes to be reminded that he is good and blameless — and quickly condemns his critics as envious or mad or driven by dark agendas. As by an unwritten law, he denounces protest as an offense against his amour propre. This condemnation, ipso facto, makes a figurative criminal of the protester, who, when her efforts are scorned, finds herself not trying to persuade, but acting in a spirit of resentment and self-vindication. She sees any act by her countryman that does not challenge the social system as intolerable evidence of complicity and collaboration. The spirit of compromise vanishes, and the protester risks falling into the attitude described by Philip Roth as “the American berserk.” My address examines this process of polarization through three indispensable American novels of protest: Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night; E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel; and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral.

2020-08-16



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Introduction: Culture, Politics, and the Canada-US Border

Jasmin Habib , Jane Desmond

Language: EN | Published: 01-02-2025 | Abstract | pp. 25-48

In this thematic issue of RIAS, we address a number of issues about the border, drawing on perspectives from multiple disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, from anthropology to political science, economics, and literature, and including the works of scholars based in Canada, the US, and Germany. Their works engage issues of Indigeneity, Africandescendant populations, Franco-Canadians, Gender and Race, Colonialisms, and the more-than-human world. Topics include hunting, cross-border Indigenous relations, treaties, oil protests, immigration, domestic workers, historical memory, creative fiction, and the notions of borders as textures, zones, lines, connections, and cultural imaginaries. Our emphasis on combining social science and humanities approaches is essential to this work. Much previous work on the Canada-US border has tended to focus either on political/legal issues or on literary/media studies. Instead, we strive instead to bring multiple disciplinary perspectives into conversation and include artistic/visual
work. This volume thus contributes to a broader project than one that would center on nationalist interests—either the US or Canada’s—and rather brings to the study of bordering practices and border theory a continental approach, one that attends to the places and spaces that are and/or become the border.

2025-02-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Imagining Rivers: The Aesthetics, History, and Politics of American Waterways. A Conversation Between Lawrence Buell and Christof Mauch

Lawrence Buell , Christof Mauch

Language: EN | Published: 30-09-2021 | Abstract | pp. 229-237

This contribution features a transatlantic conversation between Christof Mauch, environmental historian and Americanist from Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, and Lawrence Buell, literary scholar and “pioneer” of Ecocriticism from Harvard University. Buell’s The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (1995) marked the first major attempt to understand the green tradition of environmental writing, nonfiction as well as fiction, beginning in colonial times and continuing into the present day. With Thoreau’s Walden as a touchstone, this seminal book provided an account of the place of nature in the history of Western thought. Other highly acclaimed monographs include Writing for an Endangered World (2001), a book that brought industrialized and exurban landscapes into conversation with one other, and The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (2009), which provides a critical survey of the ecocritical movement since the 1970s, with an eye to the future of the discipline.

 

 

2021-09-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Directionality/Flow

Paweł Jędrzejko

Language: EN | Published: 30-11-2017 | Abstract

Paweł Jędrzejko
Department of American and Canadian Studies
Institute of English Cultures and Literatures
University of Silesia in Katowice
Poland

Directionality/Flow

Abstract: The present volume, generously guest-edited by Claudio Salmeri of the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland, offers a multifaceted insight into how American values have been “translated into Italian” and accommodated within the cultural space of twenty-first century Italy. The volume’s title, Trans/Lazio, is thus both a gesture in recognition of the complexity of the Italian cultural space and an attempt to accommodate theoretical premises of polysystem theory in a study of the mutual relations between Italy and America as simultaneously donor and acceptor cultures, simultaneously distinctive and accommodating. Emphasizing these values, the present, aptly titled, issue ushers in the second decade of RIAS, a journal univocally dedicated to the hemispheric and transoceanic study of the Americas.

2017-11-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Introduction

Sonia Caputa , Anna Gonerko-Frej

Language: EN | Published: 15-11-2014 | Abstract

The 6^th World Congress of the International American Studies Association, ‘Oceans Apart: In Search of New Wor(l)ds’, in August 2013 attracted scholars from all over the world to Szczecin, a Polish harbor city with a long multicultural, multinational, and multilingual history. Offering their multidisciplinary perspectives, the participants answered the call of Paweł Jędrzejko (the initiator and organizer) for debate on ‘the transoceanic dynamics of history’. This publication is a collection of papers presented at the conference; the first volume centered on literary topics, and the present one takes a broader, cultural angle, with articles from the world of politics, literature, education, and sociology.

Read more

2014-11-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Reinterpretation of ‘Sacred Space’ at The Newark Earthworks and Serpent Mound

Settler Colonialism and Discourses of 'Sacred'

Sandra Garner

Language: EN | Published: 28-08-2023 | Abstract | pp. 87-114

Mound-building was a preoccupation for the original, Indigenous occupants of the eastern portion of North America for at least six centuries. The efforts, from small to monumental, reflect a precision, often reflecting astronomical phenomena and are proliferated across the region. Today many remnants of these extraordinary efforts remain despite the systems of erasure that are characteristic of settler colonialism. Two such sites are the focus of this paper: the Newark Earthworks and Serpent Mound. Both sites are short-listed for UNESCO World Heritage status. Newark, Hopewell, and Serpent are all names given by dominant culture with no relation to the Indigenous architects and builders. They endure and resist, despite a long and complicated history of dominance. This paper offers a brief historical contextualization to demonstrate the ramifications of settler colonialism, which ruptured connections between Indigenous people and this land while simultaneously reinterpreting the sites as distinctly American. This lays a foundation for the web of narratives refashioned and recirculated in today’s contest over World Heritage status. Central to these narratives is ascribing the label of “sacred” to the sites and the vast number of constituents who claim “ownership” of them, including both local and global governmental agencies, historical societies, Native peoples, academics, and golfers. Furthermore, we can include those with religious and/or spiritual claims to the mounds such as the Mormons, new-agers, fundamentalist Christians, and contemporary Native tribes. Many of these stakeholders have come together to work toward the coveted World Heritage Status. But, if and when that happens, whose story will dominate? Who will make decisions? Whose voice will be heard?



2023-08-28



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Wall Art and the Presence of Absence

Jasmin Habib

Language: EN | Published: 30-06-2018 | Abstract

Jasmin Habib
University of Waterloo
Canada

Wall Art and the Presence of Absence

Abstract: This photoessay takes the reader on a walking tour through Wadi Nisnas, Haifa, Israel, where art appears on walls and where walls become art. Using de Certeau, Jasmin Habib reflects on the way that these pieces represent the political and cultural histories of Palestinian displacement, a politics of belonging as well as their return.  The artists’ imaginary of coexistence is set in stark contrast to the nativism that marks the world outside of these walls.

Keywords: Palestinians; wall art; photoessay; coexistence, de Certeau; Haifa

2018-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

On Amending the 1916 Migratory Birds Convention: Indigenous Reflections and Priorities

Philip Awashish , Jasmin Habib

Language: EN | Published: 03-01-2025 | Abstract | pp. 129-153

This article is the result of a collaboration between Philip Awashish, Eeyou leader, and anthropologist Jasmin Habib. It provides an account of the process by which the people of Eeyou Istchee, also known as the James Bay Cree, sought and, in the end, succeeded in obtaining an amendment to the Convention for the Protection of Migratory Birds in the United States and Canada (1916). The James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement signed in 1975 expressly permitted the goose hunt at all seasons and therefore conflicted with the 1916 Convention and the Act and regulations that enforced it. A protocol drawn up by Canadian and American negotiators in 1979, allowing exceptions to the closed season for Indigenous populations, was rebuffed by conservationists. However, the 1982 Canadian Constitution Act affirmed the primacy of treaty obligations of the Governments of Canada and Quebec and Indigenous peoples, and the courts ruled that it, therefore, permitted the harvesting of migratory birds. Eeyou’s attitudes respecting the economic and spiritual importance of the hunt are explored in the article. The article describes how this conflict of law was successfully resolved with a new protocol in 1995.

2025-01-03



Journal: Review of International American Studies

From Superhighway to Hyperreality: The Infrastructure of "Astral America"

Maxime McKenna

Language: EN | Published: 27-06-2024 | Abstract | pp. 139-150

During a series of road-trips undertaken in the 1970s and 1980s, the French theorist Jean Baudrillard encountered an American West that had become a laboratory of hyperreality. In his observations about “Astral America,” Baudrillard claims the perspective of an outside observer, but he exhibits a fascination for the space of the road that is characteristically American, if not at-times stereotypically so, begging the question: what is the link between postmodern theory and automobile infrastructure? This article uses Cotten Seiler’s concept of the “apparatus of automobility” (2008) to interrogate the material and discursive relations between Baudrillard’s Amérique (1986; trans. 1988) and the period in the history of American automobility in which it emerges. Just as the Interstate Highway was solidifying the private car’s supremacy, the OPEC oil embargo brought the petroleum-powered, auto-mobile ideal of the good life into crisis, opening intellectual inroads for thinking the U.S.’s hyperreal self-production while aboard the nation’s superhighways. Baudrillard's classic work of travelogue-theory invites an infrastructural account of the postmodern moment that would situate concepts from French theory and their uptake in the American academy within a context of transnationally mediated transport infrastructures.

2024-06-27



Journal: Review of International American Studies

America Observed: On an International Anthropology of the United States by Virginia R. Dominguez and Jasmin Habib, eds.

(A Book Review)

Sonja Dobroski

Language: EN | Published: 08-09-2019 | Abstract | pp. 145-150

Sonja Dobroski's review of: by Virginia R. Dominguez and Jasmin Habib, eds., America Observed. On an International Anthropology of the United States. Afterword by Jane C. Desmond. Berghahn Books, 2017.

2019-09-08



Journal: Review of International American Studies

New Wor(l)ds

Paweł Jędrzejko

Language: EN | Published: 15-05-2014 | Abstract

Perhaps the most striking feature of the International American Studies Association is that since its inception our Organization has been invariably true to its creed. Indeed, the word international in our name is a dual attribute. On the one hand, the Association’s members are a community of scholars representing all inhabited continents of the world. On the other, the Studies carried out by IASA’s academic community address questions transgressing geographical thresholds and political borders. Multinational, multiethnic and multilcultural, our International Association, dedicated to the development of International Studies of the Americas, has developed a unique sensitivity to polyphony: the melody of multilingual narratives, the blending of diverse voices, the harmony of minds and hearts celebrating the richness of their individual cultural legacies reverberating in an open, friendly conversation.
   Over the years, IASA has managed to steer its course (or, more specifically, its three courses: transatlantic, transpacific and hemispheric), thereby effectively decentralizing American Studies, a discipline whose name has long been considered to be an alternative label to US Studies—or would predominantly be associated with research whose central point of reference would be the United States of America. Respecting and appreciating the unquestionable importance of the US as the donor of cultural values and a major political player in the international arena, we pay equally careful attention to the cultures of Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, the Carribean, Polynesia and other regions of the dual Continent. We re-visit its cultures paying attention to the entire compass of musical tones, which, sometimes, become audible only when listened to from a distance. Methodologically, we have done away with the concept of the center, replacing it with the concept of a constantly shifting perspective: therefore we seem to find it easier to watch out for the inertia of the margin. Having deconstructed the binary opposition, in our studies we systematically empower both the the ‘former margin’ and the ‘former center’—and we have been doing so without preference, without prejudice. And since ‘words’ have always-already been responsible for our conceptualization(s) of ‘worlds’, we have resolved to systematically energize a variety of concurrent quests for ‘new words’ which would then enter into dynamic relations with the ‘old ones’. Listening and learning, we constantly re-visit the once (seemingly) ‘familiar’ Americas, appreciating their inexhaustible potential of meaning: pulsing with life, the Americas refuse to be frozen in the frame of one language, one methodology or one perspective. And so do our International American Studies. The present issue, guest edited by our generous friends and colleagues—Agnieszka Woźniakowska from the University of Silesia in Katowice and Anna Łakowicz-Dopiera representing the University of Szczecin—testifies to the efficiency of IASA’s intellectual practice.

Paweł Jędrzejko
RIAS Associate Editor

2014-05-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder (A Book Review)

Natalia Pająk

Language: EN | Published: 15-11-2021 | Abstract | pp. 165-173

Natalia Pająk's review of Jessica Bruder's Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

2021-11-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Dracula as Inter-American Film Icon: Universal Pictures and Cinematográfica ABSA

Antonio Barrenechea

Language: EN | Published: 16-08-2020 | Abstract | pp. 259-277

My essay explores the vampire cinema of Hollywood and Mexico.  In particular, I trace the relationship between Universal Pictures as the progenitor of horror during the Great Depression and Cinematográfica ABSA's "mexploitation" practices.  The latter resulted in the first vampire film in Latin America--"El vampiro" (1957).  Rather than strengthening separatist national cinemas, the unintended consequences of genre film production make this a case of inter-American scope.

2020-08-16



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Ten Restaurants That Changed America by Paul Freedman

(A Book Review)

L. Sasha Gora

Language: EN | Published: 08-09-2019 | Abstract | pp. 137-144

L. Sasha Gora's review of Paul Freedman's study Ten Restaurants That Changed America. Liveright, 2016.

2019-09-08



Journal: Review of International American Studies

New American Grand Tours and Travel Narratives of Video Bloggers: Leisure, Cultural Myths and Crisis Management in Visual Storytelling

Anna Maj

Language: EN | Published: 01-05-2024 | Abstract | pp. 119-142

The article concerns travel narratives of Polish video bloggers (or vloggers) who treat a journey through the Americas as a contemporary Grand Tour. Video blogs and their visual storytelling are becoming tools for describing the world in the digital era. In this context, the Americas take on the meaning of a world that is simultaneously close and distant. Traveling on both continents of the other hemisphere is characterized by a double clash of civilizations and a confrontation with one’s imagination created on the basis of encounters with the media and culture of the Americas. It is also a clash with the myth of America and, at the same time, a story about the role of a vlogger as a narrator consolidating their audience and the network community in the act of looking beyond the horizon and behind the scenes of “real America.” The research will use the analysis of the content of audiovisual material from selected YouTube travel channels and elements of netnographic analysis of virtual communities gathered around the best Polish travel vlogs.

2024-05-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Central American Rivers as Sites of Colonial Contestation

Adrian Taylor Kane

Language: EN | Published: 30-09-2021 | Abstract | pp. 177-199

In the introduction to Troubled Waters: Rivers in Latin American Imagination (2013), Elizabeth Pettinaroli and Ana María Mutis have argued that rivers in Latin American literature constitute a “locus for the literary exploration of questions of power, identity, resistance, and discontent.” Many works of testimonial literature and literature of resistance written during and about the Central American civil wars of the 1970s and 1980s as a means of denouncing and resisting various forms of oppression would support their thesis. In the 2004 film Innocent Voices, directed by Luis Mandoki, Mario Bencastro’s 1997 story “Había una vez un río,” and Claribel Alegría’s 1983 poem “La mujer del Río Sumpul,” the traumatic events in the protagonists’ lives that occur in and near rivers create an inversion of the conventional use of rivers as symbols of life, purity, innocence, and re-creation by associating them with violence, death, and destruction. At the same time, the river often becomes a metaphor for the wounds of trauma, which allude to the psychological suffering not only of the protagonists, but to the collective pain of their countries torn asunder by war. Arturo Arias’s 2015 novel El precio del consuelo also features a river as the site of state-sponsored violence against rural citizens during the civil war period. In contrast with Bencastro’s and Alegria’s texts, however, Arias’s novel highlights issues of environmental justice related to the use of rivers in Central America that continue to plague the region to date. In the present essay, I argue that these works are compelling representations of the ways in which rivers have become sites of contestation between colonial and decolonial forces in Central America.

2021-09-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

“Where Butchers Sing Like Angels,” Of Captive Bodies and Colonized Minds (With a Little Help from Louise Erdrich)

Małgorzata Poks

Language: EN | Published: 16-08-2020 | Abstract | pp. 123-144

The Master Butchers Signing Club – Louise Erdrich’s “countehistory” (Natalie Eppelsheimer) of the declared and undeclared wars of Western patriarchy–depicts a world where butchering, when done with precision and expertise, approximates art. Fidelis Waldvogel, whose name means literally Faithful Forestbird, is a sensitive German boy turned the first-rate sniper in the First World War and master butcher in his adult life in America. When Fidelis revisits his homeland after the slaughter of World War II, Delphine, his second wife, has a vision of smoke and ashes bursting out of the mouths of the master butchers singing onstage in a masterful harmony of voices. Why it is only Delphine, an outsider in the Western world, that can see the crematorium-like reality overimposed on the bucolic scenery of a small German town? Drawing on decolonial and Critical Animal Studies, this article tries to demystify some of the norms and normativities we live by.  

2020-08-16



Journal: Review of International American Studies

VISÕES DE ALÉM-MAR: a compreensão das identidades culturais latino-americana e brasileira pela literatura e pelo teatro

Elizabete Sanches Rocha

Language: EN | Published: 15-05-2016 | Abstract

[For English, scroll to the bottom of the page]

Elizabete Sanches Rocha
Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP)
Brasil

"VISÕES DE ALÉM-MAR: a compreensão das identidades culturais latino-americana e brasileira pela literatura e pelo teatro"

Para compreender o processo de formação da identidade latino-americana pós-colombiana, fruto de um violento contato com o Outro europeu, é preciso recorrer às origens mitológicas – muitas delas vinculadas ao misterioso e encantador oceano – que sustentaram grande parte do imaginário daqueles que se aventuraram a enfrentar os desafios marítimos, a fim de conquistar novas terras e seus tesouros. A literatura suscita importantes reflexões acerca da identidade latino-americana, bem como revela os discursos de subalternidade construídos ao longo dos séculos e que permanecem atualmente nas desiguais relações entre os países do Norte e os do Sul. A peça teatral Calabar, de Chico Buarque e Ruy Guerra, é um exemplo de um empreendimento estético capaz de fotografar um Brasil sob o domínio de novos conquistadores – os ditadores do Regime Civil-Militar de 1964 no Brasil e o domínio cultural e político estadunidense sobre a América Latina. O fato é que a obra revela permanências históricas capazes de remontar às origens coloniais de um determinado paradigma de exploração e de comportamento político-cultural. Pretende-se abordar a contribuição dada pela ficção literária no processo de reflexão sobre o enfrentamento entre este Eu e este Outro, tendo o oceano como caminho de encontros e de desencontros culturais.

Palavras-chave: Oceano; identidade cultural; o Outro; Latino América

"Overseas Visions: Understanding Latin American and Brazilian Cultural Identities Through Literature and Theater"

In order to fully understand the complexity of the paths of Latin American (post-Columbian) identity formation—a process born out of the first violent encounter with the European Other—it is indispensable to resort to mythologized narratives of origin, most of which are linked to the mysterious, enchanting sea. Such myths have always been the source of inspiration: they would feed the imaginations of those who, well aware of the hazards, would still choose to face the challenge of the sea in order to conquer new lands in search of new treasures. Literature evokes an important reflection about the Latin American identity. Among others, it reveals the importance—and persistence—of the discourse of the ‘subaltern’. Fostered throughout centuries, the ‘subaltern’s’ perseverance manifests itself even today in the unequal relations between the countries of the North and those of the South. Calabar, a drama by Chico Buarque and Ruy Guerra´s, is an example of an aesthetic enterprise to photograph Brazil through the lense of the new conquests: the dictatorship of the Civil-Military Regime of 1964 in Brazil and of the cultural and political dominance of the US over Latin America. The text of the play reveals historical entanglements dating back to the colonial origins of the dominant paradigm of exploitation and thereto related political and cultural scripts. This article attempts to examine the contribution of literary fiction to the process of reflection over the confrontation between the Self and the Other with the ocean as the in-between-space of cultural encounters and dis-counters.

Keywords: Sea; cultural identity; the Other; Latin American

2016-05-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Contestations Over Sacred Spaces in North America

Lucie Kýrová , Nathaniel R. Racine

Language: EN | Published: 28-08-2023 | Abstract | pp. 15-30

The article serves as an introduction to the present issue, offering the reader an insight into the Editors' overall concept, as well as an overview of the contents of the issue's "Features" section.   

2023-08-28



Journal: Review of International American Studies

The Canada/US Border: An International Boundary as Continental Cross-Section

Nathaniel R. Racine

Language: EN | Published: 30-06-2025 | Abstract | pp. 5-19

This Editor’s Note opens the present issue of RIAS through a meditation on the Canada-US border not simply as a line of division but as a dynamic cross-section—one that can reveal the entangled geographies, cultures, and histories of North America. Drawing insight from across the disciplines of geography, literature, history, and environmental studies, it proposes the east-west border as a methodological lens through which to apprehend regional continuities and local specificities alike. Exploring a number of examples, the essay considers the border as simultaneously separating and connecting the two countries, paying special attention to vernacular landscapes that defy simplistic geopolitical readings. The essay further considers the symbolic and contested role of the Haskell Free Library and Opera House in Vermont, recently politicized by US authorities, as a lived space of permeability and intercommunity resilience. Ultimately, the border emerges here as a site where the global and the local, the political and the personal, intersect— offering a uniquely instructive vantage point on the interdependent realities of modern North America.

2025-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Agnotology and the Know-Nothing Party: Then and Now

Djelal Kadir

Language: EN | Published: 30-06-2017 | Abstract

Belligerent ignorance has always proved strategic in the hegemonic goals of empire. The imperial history of the present is no exception. The Know-Nothing Party was founded in the USA in 1843, a pivotal year in America’s history of territorial expansion. It was disbanded as a national political party in the no-less pivotal year of 1860, a year in which patriotic gore would turn on itself as the grossly misnamed Civil War. Nonetheless, the political and ideological tenets of the Know-Nothing Party endure with global repercussions in the twenty-first century. The literary and historiographic diagnoses of this deliberate bellicosity founded on the cultivation of ignorance have ranged from poetic to critical discourse starting in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, in the twenty-first century, what the Germans termed schrecklichkeit (“ruthless terror”) to describe the horrors of World War I continues to be visited on peoples and nations targeted by imperial hubris and economic rapacity through a cynical strategy of expediently manufactured ignorance.

Keywords: agnotology, doublespeak, empire, epistemology, hegemony, media, realpolitik, xenophobia.

2017-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Modes and Moves of Protest

Crowds and Mobs in Nathan Hill's <i>The Nix</i>

Nicola Paladin

Language: EN | Published: 23-12-2019 | Abstract | pp. 103-118

The role of mass protest has been recurrently central yet controversial in the American culture. Central because American history presents a constellation of significant collective protest movements, very different among them but generally symptomatic of a contrast between the people and the state: from the 1775 Boston Massacre and the 1787 Shays’s Rebellion, to the 1863 Draft Riots, but also considering the 1917 Houston Riot or anti-Vietnam war pacifist protests. Controversial, since despite—or because of—its historical persistence, American mass protest has generated a media bias which labelled mobs and crowds as a disruptive popular expression, thus constructing an opposition—practical and rhetorical—between popular subversive tensions, and the so-called middle class “conservative” and self-preserving struggle.
     During the 20th century, this scenario was significantly influenced by 1968. “The sixties [we]re not fictional”, Stephen King claims in Hearts of Atlantis (1999), in fact “they actually happened”, and had a strong impact on the American culture of protest to the point that their legacy has spread into the post 9/11 era manifestations of dissent. Yet, in the light of this evolution, I believe the very perception of protesting crowds has transformed, producing a narrative in which collectivity functions both as “perpetrator” and “victim”, unlike in the traditional dichotomy. Hence, my purpose is to demonstrate the emergence of this new and historically peculiar connotation of crowds and mobs in America as a result of recent reinterpretations of the history and practice of protest in the 1960s, namely re-thinking the tropes of protest movements of those years, and relocating them in contemporary forms of protest. For this reason, I will concentrate on Nathan Hill’s recent novel, The Nix (2016), and focus on the constant dialogue it establishes between the 1968 modes of protest and the Occupy movement.

2019-12-23



Journal: Review of International American Studies

The Troubled Presence of the United States in Italy’s Political Culture: An Overview

Stefano Luconi

Language: EN | Published: 30-11-2017 | Abstract

Stefano Luconi
University of Naples L’Orientale
Italy

The Troubled Presence of the United States in Italy’s Political Culture: An Overview

This brief article examines the impact of US values on Italy’s political system since the end of World War II. It argues that, during the Cold War, the allegiance of the sizeable Communist Party to the Soviet Union, on the one hand, and the Catholics’ distrust of Americanism, on the other, prevented US principles from shaping the nation’s republican institutions and playing a significant influence on Italian political culture, notwithstanding Washington’s efforts to spread its own philosophy in the country. It also suggests that, after the end of the West-versus-East ideological conflict, the two major party coalitions paid only lip service to US values and referred to them mainly out of expediency while jockeying for position in their struggle for political power.

2017-11-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

American and European Leftist Academia through the Prism of Paul Berman’s A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968

Alexander L. Gungov

Language: EN | Published: 23-12-2019 | Abstract | pp. 89-102

In his book, Paul Berman outlines a productive framework for a further interpretation of ideas of the leftist thinkers in North America and Europe. This article tries to follow Berman’s approach and to provide a critical stance towards the views of a number of Western social and political philosophers who write after 1968 and even after 1989. My findings confirm Berman’s light irony to this trend of thought but emphasize that some of the works discussed seem to be realistic in avoiding unjustified optimism concerning the leftist position.

2019-12-23



Journal: Review of International American Studies

In Memoriam Marietta Messmer

György Tóth

Language: EN | Published: 19-12-2021 | Abstract | pp. 175-176

A farewell to Marietta Messmer (1966–2021),  the Vice President of International American Studies Association, who shaped both InterAmerican Studies and American Studies in Europe and the world. In 2009 Marietta Messmer co-founded the International Association for InterAmerican Studies, where she served as Executive Board Member and Treasurer until 2012. She was president of the Netherlands American Studies Association between 2011–2014. She was Board Member of the of the European Association of American Studies between 2009-2016, where she also served as Chair of the Organizing Committee of the conference America: Justice, Conflict, War in the Hague, April 2014. An outstanding Scholar, belowed Colleague, and fierce Friend, Marietta Messmer will be missed by all the IASA Members, whom she so mastefully led.



2021-12-19



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Where Stories Are Alive: Traveling into Wolverine’s Territory in Eowyn Ivey’s "To The Bright Edge of the World"

Małgorzata Poks

Language: EN | Published: 30-12-2024 | Abstract | pp. 71-82

In 1885 Lieutenant Colonel Forrester explores the newly acquired territory of Alaska for the US government. His passion to see an unknown world clashes with the mission Forrester has received from his military superiors.
How will he meet the dual challenge—as well as the moral dilemma—of navigating an older world that resists comprehension—a world he learns to respect—and mapping the terrain for potential military invasion?
My analysis will thus attempt to foreground the manifold paradoxes of travel/narratives. Loosely based on Lieutenant Henry Tureman Allen’s historic exploration of the Tanana and Copper rivers, Ivey’s novel departs significantly from historical accuracy in order to bring the colonizing agenda of the government-sponsored exploration party into conversation with the individual perspectives and sensibilities of its members, exposed as they are to a world where old stories are alive and where nonhumans or not-quite humans are all agential
beings. Employing anthropologist Viveiros de Castro’s theorization of Amerindian perspectivism, I want to argue that To the Bright Edge of the World decolonizes the genre of travel narratives as well as the experience of travelling between worlds.

2024-12-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Captive Minds. Norms, Normativities and the Forms of Tragic Protest in Literature and Cultural Practice

(Introduction)

Małgorzata Poks

Language: EN | Published: 16-08-2020 | Abstract | pp. 19-26

As a foundation and product of grand narratives, norms apply to any and every aspect of individual, communal, and social life. They regulate our behaviors, determine directions in the evolution of arts and philosophies, condition intra- and cross cultural understanding, organize hierarchies. Yet – when transformed into laws – norms become appropriated by dominant discourses and become “truths.” Those in control of language always construe them as “universal” and, as such, “transparent.” The usefulness of norms stems from the fact that they facilitate our orientation in the world. In the long run, however, they are bound to block our imaginative access to alternative ways of living and thinking about reality, thus enslaving our minds in a construction of reality believed to be natural. In a world so determined, dissenting perspectives and pluralities of views threaten to disrupt norms and normativities, along with the order (patriarchal, racist, sexist, ableist, speciesist, etc.) build into them. Benefactors of a normative worldview and average individuals busily trying to fit in police the perimeters of the accepted, disciplining nonconformists, rebels, and nonnormative individualists of every stripe. “Assent — and you are sane,” quipped Emily Dickinson in her well-known poem, “Demur — you’re straightway dangerous — And handled with a Chain —” (209).  Notorious for their inimical attitude to repressive majorities, artists, philosophers, academics, and other “marginal” persons have always challenged deified norms. Opening up liberatory perspectives, they have tried to escape mental captivities and imagine the world otherwise: as a place where difference is cherished and where justice reigns. Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in literature, imagines an alternative reality whose inhabitants, Heterotopians, constantly suspend commonly held beliefs in order to examine their validity. Passive perception, argues Tokarczuk, “has moral significance. It allows evil to take root” (43). Without a periodical suspension of belief in truths so deeply naturalized that they look like Truth Itself, we become perpetrators of the evil glossed over by narratives whose veracity we take for granted.

2020-08-16



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Modern America: Gwendolyn Bennett and Victoria Ocampo Capture the Continents

Sonita Sarker

Language: EN | Published: 01-03-2010 | Abstract

TO BE ADDED

2010-03-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

"Strangers Still More Strange": The Meaning of Rivers Bedeviled

T.S. McMillin

Language: EN | Published: 30-09-2021 | Abstract | pp. 49-75

Steamboats transformed rivers in 19^th-century United States, providing what many people considered a kind of mastery over nature. In literature from the period, while most writers marveled at or exulted in that perceived mastery, some questioned the origins of the reputed conquest. Did it result from human ingenuity? divine inspiration? a deal with the devil? Amid all the fog, smoke, and various other vapors associated with the steamboat, vivid stories, compelling dramas, and comic searches for meaning took shape, and no literary work captured the tension informing, uncertainty surrounding, and ramifications emerging from this instance of technological innovation as powerfully as The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857). Herman Melville’s last novel, The Confidence-Man explores the author’s notion that “Books of fiction” can perhaps give readers more truth, “more reality, than real life can show.” Literature, for Melville, was an opportunity to reconsider the nature of things and our means of understanding that nature. In The Confidence-Man, he presented readers with a different view of the Mississippi River and the curious vessels working its waters. The novel imagined The Devil himself to be on board the steamboat, imperiling the soul of America.

2021-09-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Walking with and on Turtle Island: Indigenous Activist and Artistic Expressions in North America as Counter-Mapping Practices

Sabina Sweta Sen-Podstawska

Language: EN | Published: 01-05-2024 | Abstract | pp. 83-98

Indigenous Peoples have expressed, remembered, and performed spatial orientation, imaginations, and relations as part of their various movements across Turtle Island (the North American continent according to some Indigenous Nation’s creation stories), including migration, trading, hunting, gathering, and also the forced displacement of Indigenous Peoples from their ancestral lands to reserves. Gwilym Lucas Eades’ (2016) research demonstrates how Indigenous communities understand spatial imagination and use maps and digital media to express their cultural identity, reclaim land and assert their sovereignty, tell stories, transmit cultural knowledge, and counter colonial narratives through counter-mapping showing the essence of one’s spatial awareness. In the context of this study, I understand counter-mapping as a form of activism against dominant power structures to restore the voices and perspectives of Indigenous nations that oppose Western notions of place and spatial imagination and question the arbitrarily imposed by colonization borders between different areas on earth, between people and between nature and man. This paper explores three different forms of walking experiences as Indigenous counter-mapping practices. The protest walk initiated by David Kawapit, known as the Journey of Nishiyuu or the Journey of the People, a 1,600-kilometer journey of a group of young Cree walkers from Whapmagoostui, Quebec to Parliament Hill in Ottawa to support the Idle no More movement marks a contemporary activist expression of embodied mapping through journeying. The traveling art installation project Walking With Our Sisters, honoring the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada, demonstrates how Indigenous artists bridge the walking and traveling experience to enact a counter-mapping practice for resurgence and healing of the community. Finally, Frost Exploding Trees Moon, a solo performance choreographed by Michelle Olson and Floyd Favel, presents how Indigenous performers draw from travel stories and nomadic experiences of their ancestors to establish contemporary artistic expressions of embodied mapping as forms of resistance to colonial narratives. Drawing from decolonial cartographic approaches and Indigenous perspectives on land and mapmaking, these Indigenous activist and artistic performances of journeying are theorized as counter-mapping practices offering decolonial mapping of Turtle Island and embodied healing.

2024-05-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

AMERICA/AMERICAS: CULTURES, CANONS AND COURSES

Cyraina Johnson-Roullier

Language: EN | Published: 01-03-2008 | Abstract

TO BE ADDED

2008-03-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Indigenous Diaspora, Identity, and Settler Colonial Borders

Rowland Keshena Robinson

Language: EN | Published: 03-01-2025 | Abstract | pp. 49-63

This paper examines the complex interplay between Indigenous identity and settler-colonial borders through autoethnographic and storytelling approaches. As both an Indigenous person of the Menominee Nation of Wisconsin and an immigrant from the island of Bermuda, my experiences span both oceanic and continental borders between the United States, Canada, where I presently live and work, and the United Kingdom’s largest remaining overseas territory, providing a unique vantage point on the politics of Indigenous identity across these settler-imposed boundaries. Using these experiences as a starting point and inspired by the works of Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson and sociologist Avery Gordon, in this paper, I integrate personal narrative with critical analysis to examine the complex nature of an Indigenous life lived across the borders of settler colonialism. Further, I also examine the historical and contemporary ramifications of the Jay Treaty and, in doing so, highlight the asymmetrical recognition of Indigenous rights to mobility upon their traditional territories, territories that existed long before the arrival of settlers to North America, between the United States and Canada. This treaty, which ostensibly provides certain border-crossing rights to Indigenous peoples, is upheld by the United States but not Canada. Not only does this asymmetry underscore the persistent challenges faced by Indigenous communities in asserting their ancient pre-colonial mobility rights, but it also speaks significantly to the imbalance of power that exists between nominally sovereign Indigenous nations and the sovereignties of settler nation-states whose border controls Indigenous people are now subject. Through this narrative, the paper seeks to contribute to the broader discourse on Indigenous internationalism and the ethical responsibilities of Indigenous scholars. By centering stories and storytelling as both epistemological and methodological tools, the paper advocates for a decolonial approach honoring the interconnectedness of Indigenous experiences and the enduring ties between Indigenous nations across borders.

2025-01-03



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Buddies, Lovers, and Detours: America and its Road Movies

Sasha Gora

Language: EN | Published: 19-12-2021 | Abstract | pp. 103-119

Is an open road also a democratic one? Zooming in on two films—Queen & Slim (2019) and Unpregnant (2020)—this article discusses American road movie genre from the perspective of 2021, and how contemporary film narratives intersect with race and gender. One movie often drives in another film’s lane, meaning the genre is self-referential. Unfolding in three parts, the article begins by introducing these two films and surveying how they contribute to the road movie genre. It then discusses cars and clothing as characters and concludes by considering surveillance and how these films, in tandem, take the temperature of contemporary American society.

2021-12-19



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Paradigms of Otherness. The American Savage in British Eighteenth-Century Popular and Scholarly Literature

Federica Perazzini

Language: EN | Published: 16-08-2020 | Abstract | pp. 235-258

In this article, I trace the changes in the literary and material representations of the indigenous peoples of North America within the British sphere of cultural production. As a first example, I will give an account of the episode of the “Four Iroquois Kings” envoy at Queen Ann’s court in 1710, focusing on the resonance of such a historical encounter in popular texts and iconographic material. As a second example, I analyze the popular story of Inkle and Yarico included in Richard Steele’s The Spectator in 1711, showing its impact on the early Enlightenment reflections on colonial trade. In my conclusion, I examine the role of American natives in the scholarly works of the Scottish Enlightenment, in order to show how they were used as comparable types for the observation of the roots of European civilizations thus justifying the construction of the British imperial hegemony both geopolitical terms and discursive practice.

2020-08-16



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Ritual Roadways and Places of Power in the Chaco World (ca. AD 850-1150)

Robert Weiner

Language: EN | Published: 28-08-2023 | Abstract | pp. 49-86

This paper considers the topic of sacred spaces in North America through the vantage offered by Chacoan roads, monumental avenues constructed by Ancestral Four Corners people of the US Southwest from ca. AD 850-1150. I begin with a critique of the concept of the “sacred” as applied to the Chacoan past, suggesting instead that the Indigenous North American concept of power (in the sense of potent, generative force infused throughout the environment) offers a more culturally relevant framing. Next, I present three examples of locations along Chacoan roads that I argue were recognized as places of power due to the inherent landscape affordances of these locales. I close by briefly describing some of the practices carried out along Chacoan roads and drawing a connection between the understanding of “sacredness” evidenced through the archaeology of Chacoan roads and contemporary Native American activist efforts to protect landscapes of great power and meaning.

 

2023-08-28



Journal: Review of International American Studies

HOW FAR IS AMERICA FROM HERE?

Theo D’haen

Language: EN | Published: 01-09-2007 | Abstract

TO BE ADDED

2007-09-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Drawing the Medicine Line: Bordertextures in Whoop-Up Country

Astrid M. Fellner

Language: EN | Published: 03-01-2025 | Abstract | pp. 155-180

This article focuses on “Whoop-Up Country” in the Canadian/American West, analyzing a series of multi-layered cartographic texts through the lens of bordertextures. While the meaning of the Whoop-Up Trail may have faded into obscurity, the hidden histories, geographies, and knowledges of this border zone have survived and continue to resurface in the cultural imaginary. Zooming in on texts by Paul F. Sharp, Wallace Stegner, and Thomas King, the analysis carves out the multi-dimensional (hi)stories of the Canada-US border that account for the complexity of North American borderlands.

2025-01-03



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Plague, Pestilence, Pandemic: Keywords for a Cultural Epidemiology of the Present

Djelal Kadir

Language: EN | Published: 29-12-2023 | Abstract | pp. 67-88

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.

2023-12-29



Journal: Review of International American Studies

A Note from the New Book Review Editor

Manlio Della Marca

Language: EN | Published: 08-09-2019 | Abstract | pp. 129-130

Starting with this issue, our journal will include a completely redesigned Book Review Section, featuring three to five high-quality reviews by leading and emerging scholars from around the world. As for the selection of the books to be reviewed, even though I am a literary scholar, it is my intention as Review Editor to consider books that engage with the U.S. and the Americas as a hemispheric and global phenomenon from a wide range of perspectives and disciplines, including anthropology, art history, and media studies.

2019-09-08



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Car Painting in America: Edward Hopper's Vision of the Road

Ewa Wylezek-Targosz

Language: EN | Published: 19-12-2021 | Abstract | pp. 75-88

The article presents an analysis of three paintings by one of the greatest American realist painters, Edward Hopper. The three selected works share a common denominator: they all address the concept of a car and the influence it has on the nation’s life—it has altered the way people traveled and expressed their identity. A car in Hopper’s works serves a twofold function, it allows its drivers and passengers to experience the land more as they can travel wherever they desire but, on the other hand, it contributes to a separation from their environment as the journey involves fragmentariness and rootlessness. 


2021-12-19



Journal: Review of International American Studies


Decolonial Animal Ethics in Linda Hogan’s Poetry and Prose. Towards Interspecies Thriving by Małgorzata Poks (Book Review)
Ann-Sofie Lönngren
Language: EN | Published: 28-06-2024 | Abstract | pp. 151-156
Małgorzata Pok’s Decolonial Animal Ethics in Linda Hogan’s Poetry and Prose: Towards Interspecies Thriving (2023) focuses on the relationship between the modern, hierarchical, anthropocentric view of non-human animals, and the traditional, relational view in Indigenous ontologies. In dialogue with human-animal studies, decolonial studies, and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), the study provides an in-depth engagement with the literary authorship of Chickasaw poet and novelist Linda Hogan. The questions that Poks asks are: What is the significance of Indigenous knowledges for the Anthropocene? How do these knowledges relate to the extinction of species and environmental grief? What insights are offered by Indigenous ethics to activists and decision makers in this regard? Despite the scope of Hogan’s production there is not much written about her literary production, Poks claims, even less so about the representation of the human-animal relationship in it. This is a lack which Poks makes up for in a thorough investigation of Hogan’s prose and poetry from the 1970’s until today. In Hogan’s works, themes like mercy, compassion, wildness, grief, and the connection between femininity and animality are in constant dialogue with the painful story of Indigenous America. Through Hogan’s own experiences in life, her description of places like Oklahoma and Colorado gain both material and metaphorical qualities. This is also the case with the landscapes and the non-human animals who inhabit them and who become agents in their own right in a constant yet shifting and transformative relationship to the human, who is thus decentered in effective ways.
2024-06-28



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Oil Pipeline Resistance in Canada and the US: Similarities, Cross Border Alliances and Border Effects

Paul Bowles

Language: EN | Published: 03-01-2025 | Abstract | pp. 81-104

The construction of new oil pipelines and the expansion of existing ones have been met with sustained resistance across North America. Pipeline expansion has been justified for economic reasons, but has emerged as a “chokepoint” for the industry as popular resistance has sought to protect land and water resources. This resistance has both national and cross-border continental dimensions, depending on the specificities of the pipeline under analysis. The cross-border dimensions are particularly evident in the efforts to halt the expansion of Canada’s tar sands, the source of much of the increased oil production. Despite the continental scope of the oil industry, however, distinct national dimensions—“border effects”—and cross-border alliances remain.

2025-01-03



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Democracy and Truth: A Short History by Sophia Rosenfeld (A Book Review)

Sakina Shakil Gröppmaier

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2020 | Abstract | pp. 209-214

Rosenfeld, Sophia. Democracy and Truth: A Short History, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.  ISBN13: 9780812250848 -- a book review by Sakina Shakil Gröppmaier

2020-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

The Land of Heathens versus the Land of Liberty. Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad and Ubeydullah Efendi’s Travels

S. Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş

Language: EN | Published: 27-06-2024 | Abstract | pp. 67-86

Mark Twain’s (1835-1910) literary travelogue, The Innocents Abroad (1869), remarks on and/or subverts previously established interpretations of places and objects. Twain’s adopted persona allows him to assume the double role of a fool and an intellectual, simultaneously, by deploying a peculiar type of humor. By openly distaining and emphasizing certain aspects of his travel experiences, Twain’s narrator seems naïve on one hand, but a savvy social critic on the other. Twain’s account of İstanbul (Constantinople) streets, drinking Turkish coffee, and Turkish bath experience become farcical descriptions of the Ottoman Empire. His choice of words—such as “the rustiest old barn in heathendom”—also confirms his ideological viewpoint of Ottoman lands. Unlike Twain, Ubeydullah Efendi (1858-1937), who travels in the opposite direction, to the United States from the Ottoman Empire, paints a positive picture of American urban life. He spends most of his time at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, which he describes in detail. One could argue that since the Ottoman Empire was on the cusp of becoming the Turkish Republic, Ubeydullah Efendi’s descriptions of his American voyage were naturally written in a progressive tone. Yet, a closer inspection reveals subtle criticism, as well as an awareness of how others viewed him as an Ottoman gentleman. Thus, his portrayals do not stem from internalized Orientalism; rather, they are the result of informed observations based on his cultural experiences. Both Mark Twain’s and Ubeydullah Efendi’s journalistic travel accounts to each other’s countries cannot be separated from the ideological and rhetorical dimensions of the era’s travel writing. This presentation will focus on both narrators’ approach and gaze in a comparative manner. While Twain portrays Ottoman lands in a hostile or condescending manner, with descriptors such as “filthy,” “brutish,” “ignorant,” or “unprogressive,” Ubeydullah Efendi’s accounts are not so one dimensional. Twain’s peculiar humor and narrative attitude were obviously influenced by the political events of the time, and his views were tainted by his orientalist approach. Conversely, Ubeydullah Efendi’s straightforward depictions, and occasional humor, are connected to his personality and offer a far more realistic portrayal of late nineteenth-century America.

2024-06-27



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Introduction

Molly Geidel , J. D. Schnepf

Language: EN | Published: 15-06-2022 | Abstract | pp. 17-29

The recent intensification of gendered surveillance in the United States underscores how surveillance technologies continue to abet criminalization domestically while enabling the US to renew orientalist narratives of rescue with respect to its military interventions abroad. Building on the 2015 Feminist Surveillance Studies volume edited by Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana Amielle Magnet, this issue seeks to make a number of new interventions in the study of surveillance and gender. First, it calls for the incorporation of scholarship that approaches the US-led war on terrorism through the lens of gender and sexuality to develop a more refined understanding of how surveillance practices and contemporary imperial imaginaries overlap and inform one another. Second, it reconsiders the frame of carceral feminism by unpacking some of the assumptions around “carcerality” and “feminism.” Finally, it builds on the premise that existing black feminist scholarship has for some time theorized surveillance’s relation to gendered oppression. To do so, it considers how critical framings of hypervisibility and invisibility help us make sense of the racialized, gendered forms of surveillance deployed across the decades: from the mid-twentieth-century national security state to the contemporary neoliberal postfeminist regimes of the twenty-first century.

2022-06-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Decolonizing Justice: Indigenous Feminist Activism in Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Sovereignty

Sara Riccetti

Language: EN | Published: 30-05-2024 | Abstract | pp. 195-217

This article offers an analysis of the 2018 play Sovereignty by Cherokee playwright, lawyer, and activist Mary Kathryn Nagle. First performed at the Arena Stage Theatre in Washington DC, Sovereignty unfolds over two parallel timelines: present-day Oklahoma and the early 1800s in the southern Appalachians. In the present day, young Cherokee lawyer Sarah Ridge Polson and Cherokee Attorney General Jim Ross defend the inherent jurisdiction of the Cherokee Nation under the Violence Against Women Act in a pivotal case before the US Supreme Court. This modern struggle is juxtaposed with scenes from the 1800s, where their ancestors grapple with a proposed treaty with Andrew Jackson’s administration, leading to the signing of the Treaty of New Echota and the Trail of Tears. By juxtaposing historical and contemporary events, Nagle illuminates the enduring effects of government policies and laws that continue to render Indigenous people, particularly Indigenous women, vulnerable. This article explores how Sovereignty exemplifies Indigenous feminist literary activism through performative counter-storytelling, a method that enacts decolonization and reframes the stage as a critical space for asserting Indigenous performative sovereignty and self-determination. Using an Indigenous feminist literary critical approach, this article shows how Nagle constructs a counter-narrative that advances decolonization by addressing gendered outcomes of colonial law, challenging patriarchal cultural practices of misrepresentation, and embodying “radical relationality”—a concept of collective political organization based on principles of interdependency and responsibility. Through the character of Sarah Ridge Polson and her activism to restore sovereignty over her body and her nation, Sovereignty exemplifies Indigenous feminist activism through theater, reasserting Indigenous women as agents of cultural transmission and tribal values, illustrating that tribal sovereignty and gender empowerment are inherently interconnected and mutually reinforcing.

2024-05-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

‘Higher Laws’ and ‘Divine Madness’: Transnational and Translocal Configurations of Quixotic In/Sanity in the American Renaissance

Albena Bakratcheva

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2020 | Abstract | pp. 87-101

The New England Transcendentalists deliberately chose a position which by definition did not belong to what was to them the common “prosaic mood” (Thoreau) of their time. Their choice was the result of representatively romantic discontent with their contemporary reality and, at the same time, through the vigorous drive of the Puritan spiritual leadership, it was essentially anachronistic. The sophisticated delight of identifying with such a doubly anomalous nonconformist ideal only intensified the need for counterbalancing the prosaic sanity of the real world with a wished-for poetic insanity, or “madness from the gods” (Emerson). Such “madness by romantic identification” whose “features have been fixed once and for all by Cervantes” (Foucault), naturally caused “Quixotic confusion” between reality and imagination and the substitution of the true with the fabulous. Though peculiarly intensified in the former Puritan context and in the context of ‘Americanness’ in which the nineteenth century New England intellectuals placed it, the problem was far from being merely a local, New England-centered, phenomenon. This paper argues that in their ‘in/sane’ Quixotic quest for perfection, which caused a series of personal failures, the New England Transcendentalists were remarkably faithful saunterers in a blessed place that, to them, was both America and, at the same time, the all-encompassing perennial—translocal and transnational—world, inviting them to establish what Emerson called “an original relation to the universe.”

 

2020-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Empire of Ruins: American Culture, Photography, and the Spectacle of Destruction by Miles Orvell

(A Book Review)

Julia Faisst

Language: EN | Published: 28-08-2023 | Abstract | pp. 319-326

Julia Faisst's review of Miles Orvell's Empire of Ruins: American Culture, Photography, and the Spectacle of Destruction

2023-08-28



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Preface: The “Other” Border and the Present Moment

Virginia R. Dominguez

Language: EN | Published: 13-02-2025 | Abstract | pp. 21-24

This thematic issue of RIAS explores the evolving dynamics of US-Canada relations amidst the backdrop of Donald Trump’s second presidential term and Justin Trudeau’s resignation as Canadian Prime Minister. The issue gains heightened relevance due to Trump’s provocative rhetoric, including threats of economic tariffs, discussions of annexation, and broader expansionist ambitions. The US-Canada border has historically been viewed as stable compared to the US-Mexico border, yet this assumption is being challenged. 
The issue examines how the US imagines Canada, often overlooking its Indigenous and multicultural realities, and interrogates  historical and contemporary border tensions. Featuring interdisciplinary perspectives from scholars in Canada, the US, and beyond, the issue contextualizes current political shifts by addressing historical policies on immigration, Indigenous rights, and cultural representation. Through its engagement with global American studies, this issue underscores the necessity of examining US-Canada relations from multiple international perspectives.

2025-02-13



Journal: Review of International American Studies

The Chosen People: The Hudson River School and the Construction of American Identity

Tricia Cusack

Language: EN | Published: 30-09-2021 | Abstract | pp. 107-152

This article considers nineteenth-century riverscapes of the Hudson in relation to the formation of American identity. It argues that riverscapes in the United States contributed to welding a national identity to a Christian one, although officially the identities were distinct. I examine the role of the Hudson River School in the creation of the ‘wilderness’ as an image of American homeland, and how this construct incorporated the iconic figure of the Euro-American Christian ‘pilgrim-pioneer.’ America looked more to the future than to the past for its national narrative, and an orientation to the future was symbolized in art by the flow of the Hudson toward distant horizons, while the pioneer identity was extended to embrace the entrepreneur-developer. The pioneer has remained an iconic figure for American nationalism, but is now more firmly located in the nation’s past; Janus’s gaze has been adjusted, demonstrating the potentially fluid character of nationalist discourse.

2021-09-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

El amazonas de tres viajeros cartógrafos: entre la experiencia y la imaginación geográfica [The Amazon of Three Cartographer-Travelers: Between Experience and Geographic Imagination]

Daniel Esteban Unigarro

Language: EN | Published: 03-06-2024 | Abstract | pp. 105-121

Desde la primera mitad del siglo XVI el río Amazonas empezó a ser representado cartográficamente, en principio por el avistamiento de sus bocas y posteriormente por los recorridos que se emprendieron. El primero de estos supuso su azaroso descubrimiento en 1542 por una expedición española que partió de Quito y llegó hasta el Atlántico. Un siglo más tarde, los portugueses invirtieron el sentido y remontaron el gran río desde la desembocadura hasta los Andes. Estos recorridos estuvieron acompañados por cronistas cuyas informaciones y registros sirvieron como fuente de inspiración para las descripciones europeas del Nuevo Mundo. Se pretende entonces mostrar la evolución de los imaginarios y las representaciones de la Amazonia desde la experiencia de tres viajeros que atravesaron el océano entre los siglos XVI y XVII, pero además fueron cartógrafos que legaron mapas recurrentes en atlas, compendios y trabajos historiográficos sobre la región que probablemente más haya despertado la curiosidad y también la imaginación en América. Desde el bosquejo de una desembocadura en el Atlántico hasta una vista aérea del curso del río, pasando por una figura serpenteante, se presentan tres representaciones cartográficas del Amazonas como productos de la experiencia de viaje, que evidencia diferentes formas de acercarse y percibir la realidad, junto con la imaginación geográfica, mezcla de ideas fantásticas, ideales y míticas con saberes prácticos en relación con el reconocimiento del territorio.

[Since the first half of the 16th century, the Amazon River began to be cartographically represented, initially through the sighting of its mouths and later by expeditions undertaken along its course. The first of these marked its perilous discovery in 1542 by a Spanish expedition that set out from Quito and reached the Atlantic. A century later, the Portuguese reversed the route, ascending the great river from its mouth to the Andes. These journeys were accompanied by chroniclers whose information and records served as sources of inspiration for European descriptions of the New World. This study aims to illustrate the evolution of imaginaries and representations of the Amazon from the experiences of three travelers who crossed the ocean between the 16th and 17th centuries. These individuals were also cartographers who contributed maps frequently included in atlases, compendiums, and historiographical works on the region, which likely sparked the most curiosity and also the imagination in America. From the sketch of a mouth at the Atlantic to an aerial view of the river's course, through a serpentine figure, three cartographic representations of the Amazon are presented as products of the travel experience. These depictions reveal different ways of approaching and perceiving reality, along with geographical imagination, a blend of fantastic, ideal, and mythical ideas with practical knowledge related to the recognition of the territory.]

2024-06-03



Journal: Review of International American Studies

The Monster Minority: John Yoo’s Multicultural Instruction and the “Torture Memos”

Emily Raymundo

Language: EN | Published: 15-06-2022 | Abstract | pp. 31-49

In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States declared a war on terrorism that would come to rely on legal memoranda to justify the surveillance, detention, and torture of “terrorists” held at the Guantánamo Bay Military Prison. Analyzing the language of these 2002 “Torture Memos,” this article contends that the memos discursively produced not only the racial formation of the terrorist but also the emergent figure of the “monster minority,” embodied by then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General, John Yoo. Defined in this essay as a patriotic, individualistic, and exceptional racialized subject who works on behalf of counterterrorism, the monster minority plays a central role in the legal construction of the terrorist precisely because of his exemplary status within US society. While Asian American studies explains the formation of the model minority that accounts for Yoo as a beneficiary of elite multicultural education, and post-9/11 studies of U.S. imperialism elucidate the formation of the terrorist-as-monster, this essay puts these fields in conversation to establish how Yoo’s particular brand of Asian American masculinity consolidates both the racialized enemy and the racialized agent of the US security state.

2022-06-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

El País de las Amazonas: Una delimitación imaginada en la cartografía francesa colonial del siglo XVIII

Daniel Esteban Unigarro

Language: EN | Published: 01-05-2024 | Abstract | pp. 99-117

Since the mid-16th century, cartographic representations of the New World included a large river that crossed the southern continent from east to west. Despite names such as Santa María de la Mar Dulce or Río de Orellana, in reference to the Spanish captain who led the expedition that made its hazardous discovery in 1542, a mythical European reference ended up prevailing: the Amazons River. This hydronym also became the toponym that since then refers to the extensive basin defined by the wide main channel with its innumerable tributaries. Nevertheless, during the colonial domination period, none of the European empires used the term “Amazon” to officially name any of their jurisdictions in America. Then the aim is to demonstrate how French cartography produced during the 18th century constantly presented and reproduced an imagined territorial delimitation marked as “the Country of the Amazons”, probably in accordance with the French colonial interest in establishing a presence in the region disputed mainly by the Spanish and Portuguese. Although, in the end, such delimitation was just another product of the colonial geographic imagination and, specially, of the mythical imaginaries associated with the region since its discovery.

2024-05-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Food, Technology and Translocal Transformations of Taste: Industrial and Processed Food in Yucatán

Steffan Igor Ayora-Díaz

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2020 | Abstract | pp. 103-121

Translocality as originally used by Arjun Appadurai was an evocative concept that appealed immediately to anthropologists and others who study global-local connections. Its use has been widely adopted in religious studies, music studies, migration studies and food studies, but it has continued to be rather undefined, which makes it difficult to apply to local data. Here, from the study of local food and gastronomy in the Mexican state of Yucatán, I investigate how translocality can help us look at the global in the local and the local in the global. I propose that when it comes to studying food and gastronomy in the Yucatán, translocality can help us understand the ways in which industrialization, which became both a production model and a way of life in the United States and Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, rapidly extended to food everywhere, and Yucatecans fondly took to the consumption of industrially produced and processed foods, incorporating them into the local gastronomy. The results, in terms of taste, have been extensive but are not particular to the Yucatán, since food and gastronomy everywhere have been impacted in similar ways. However, when we analyze the changes in local dishes and preparations, we can see how ubiquitous industrialized food has become and how it has affected the particular configurations of ingredients in Yucatecan cuisine.

2020-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Czech Sacred Places in Texas as the Key Element for Preserving Czech Identity

Lukáš Perutka

Language: EN | Published: 28-08-2023 | Abstract | pp. 115-142

The process of Czech and Moravian immigration to Texas is a well-known phenomenon. Since 1848, tens of thousands decided to cross the ocean to seek a better future in the “Lone Star state.“ Although their history is well documented, there are still themes to be explored. Their religious activity and the connection it has created with their metropolis is one of them. The church and its institutions sent priests to America to attend to the immigrants in their mother tongue and helped them preserve their cultural identity. Furthermore, they organized the construction of their sacred places that would remind the parishioners of their home country. One example could be the famous painted churches still present in Texas today.

This topic has not received proper attention from historians because it requires studying sources on both sides of the Atlantic. The presented contribution tries to change this unflattering fact using the microhistorical approach. Its aim is threefold. First, explain the historical dimension of the religious connection between the Czech and Moravian immigrants in Texas with their metropolis. Second, describe the sacred places of the immigrants, how they were built, what role they played in their everyday life, and how they established a bond with their country of origin. Third, what importance did the sacred places of the Czechs and Moravians have in preserving their language and cultural identity? The microhistorical approach demands the use of various and fragmented sources, and this study will be no exception. It will use archive material from Austria and the Czech Republic, principally the funds of the religious organizations that supported the immigrants in Texas, such as the Leopoldine Society. Furthermore, the article will use published contemporary personal recounts and secondary literature. The content of these sources will be critically analysed to answer the research questions and hopefully contribute to the theme of religion and its invaluable role in an immigrant society.

2023-08-28