Search Results

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

(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

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

Theories of the Global, Global Literature, and American Literature in a Globalizing Age

Ulfried Reichardt

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

Ulfried Reichardt
Amerikanistik,
Universität Mannheim

Theories of the Global, Global Literature, and American Literature in a Globalizing Age

Abstract: The paper discusses theories of the global and approaches to the concept of the world, presents definitions of literature in a globalizing age, and examines proposals how to approach world literature in literary scholarship, including ones that regard world literature as a system and ones that focus on individual texts. Finally, the essay argues that in our digitally restructured knowledge world, contemporary novels reflecting on the transformations of media and of knowledge formation have to be considered as versions of world literature as well.

Keywords: World Literature, globalization and literature, theories of the global, concepts of the “world,” digitalization

2017-06-30



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

Distâncias...

Paweł Jędrzejko

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

DISTÂNCIAS…
[for English, scroll to the bottom of the page]

não possa tanta distância
deixar entre nós
este sol
que se põe entre uma onda
e outra onda
no oceano dos lençóis
Paulo Leminski

Eu não escolhi abrir a presente nota editorial com um poema de Paulo Leminski porque sou polonês; e, para ser sincero, tampouco o fiz devido ao fato de ele ser brasileiro. Fiz isso porque a sensibilidade profundamente empática de Leminski, pulsando na linguagem, parece ressoar com perfeição o teor desse inovador número da Review of International American Studies. Feito por eminentes colegas, intelectuais excelentes e cuidadosos como Alice Áurea Penteado Martha, Elizabete Sanches Rocha, Ricardo Portella de Aguiar, Virna Ligia Fernandes Braga e Márcio Roberto do Prado, essa edição da RIAS aborda aquele que talvez seja o valor mais importante nesse mundo sempre dilacerado pelos desumanos vendavais da História: nosso potencial para entender. A inefável palpabilidade da experiência corriqueira daquilo que Martin Heidegger descreveu como Sorge transcende os oceanos. O distante, o longínquo, torna-se estranhamente familiar quando visto através da delicada tessitura dos textos entrelaçados. A metáfora ondulante de Leminski, tão ‘têxtil’, captura-nos em sua teia cuidadosamente tecida: os lençóis, no fim das contas, remetem tanto ao contexto hídrico quanto à roupa de cama. Em ambos repousamos nossos amores, medos e desejos; enredadas entre os lençóis todas as aporias naufragam e se rendem. Os lençóis brancos tornam-se confidentes de nossas sensações inefáveis. Remorso e pánta reî. A raiva da conquista sem fim e o nascimento de mitologias que resistem à imposição de paradigmas (neo)coloniais. Nossos traumas de passados violentos, presentes esperançosos, futuros incertos. Nossa perplexidade frente à experiência quântica do real fundindo-se sem pudor no virtual para, no fim das contas, desafiar o continuum espaço-temporal. Nosso egoísmo e nossa solidariedade, nossa ganância e nossa responsabilidade cívica, nosso medo e nossa coragem. Nossos diálogos sobre intraduzibilidade. Tudo isso, visto através da lente do discurso do Brasil, costura a riquíssima textura do tecido cultural do nosso mundo, que, através desse discurso, torna-se tangível. O tom quente e aveludado do português brasileiro oferece um (pre)texto mais que bem-vindo para que todos nós possamos submergir em uma mútua, thoreauniana, experiência de escuta. Ouvindo atentamente, para não perder nenhuma palavra dita por um amigo do outro lado da lagoa. Uma lagoa muito maior, embora, talvez, muito menor do que a lagoa de Walden jamais poderia ser.

A RIAS, mais uma vez, oferece-nos uma chance de nos surpreendermos ouvindo. Existência encarnada: estética e essência casadas em um ato de poesia silenciosa que não se limita a comentar sobre os (e)ventos contra os quais a bondade humana pode ser o único escudo, farol e porto seguro. Abraçando o Brasil de Alice Áurea Penteado Martha, Elizabete Sanches Rocha, Ricardo Portella de Aguiar, Virna Ligia Fernandes Braga e Márcio Roberto do Prado, nós nos sintonizamos com um comprimento de onda para além da dialética de semelhança e diferença. Vemos nossos próprios rostos refletidos no espelho do mar, entre os lampejos de sol, virando as páginas, o leito do papel em branco. A poesia de Leminski tem muito a ver com ouvir o que sussurra do outro lado da lagoa: torna toda distância minúscula, ainda que reconheça sua importância. Tudo que ecoa na distância é um convite.

Vamos ouvir.

Distâncias Mínimas
um texto morcego
se guia por ecos
um texto texto cego
um eco anti anti anti antigo
um grito na parede rede rede
volta verde verde verde
com mim com com consigo
ouvir é ver se se se se se
ou se se me lhe te sigo?

Paweł Jędrzejko
Editor Asociado RIAS


DISTANCES

não possa tanta distância
deixar entre nós
este sol
que se põe entre uma onda
e outra onda
no oceano dos lençóis
Paulo Leminski

I did not choose to open this Ed/Note with Paulo Leminski’s poem because I am Polish; quite honestly, I did not do it because he was Brazilian either. I did this, because Leminski’s profoundly empathic sensitivity, pulsing in language, seems to ideally resonate with the tenor of this groundbreaking issue of the Review of International American Studies. Created by eminent Colleagues, excellent, caring intellectuals—Alice Áurea Penteado Martha, Elizabete Sanches Rocha, Ricardo Portella de Aguiar, Virna Ligia Fernandes Braga and Márcio Roberto do Prado, this issue of RIAS addresses perhaps the most important value in the world forever torn by inhuman gales of history: our potential to understand.

The unspeakable palpability of the commonplace experience of what Martin Heidegger described as Sorge transcends the oceans. The distant, the far off, becomes strangely familiar when seen through the gauze of the interweaving texts. Leminski’s undulating, ‘textile’, metaphor holds: lençóis, after all, may be translated as linens as well as sheets. We entrust both with our loves, fears and desires; between sheets aporias surrender. The white sheets become privy to our ineffable sensations. Remorse and panta rhei. The anger at the neverending conquest and the birth of mythologies that resist the imposition of (neo)colonial paradigms. Our traumas of violent pasts, hopeful presents, uncertain futures. Our bafflement at the quantum experience of the actual seemlessly fusing into the virtual to ultimately defy timespace. Our selfishness and our solidarity; our greed and our civic responsibility; our fear and our courage. Our dialogs over untranslatability. All this, seen through the lense of the discourse of Brazil, makes up the immensely rich texture of the cultural fabric of our world, which, through that discourse, is made tangible. The warm velvet of Brazilian Portuguese offers a most welcome pre-text for all of us to indulge in a mutual, Thoreauvian, experience of listening. Listening intently, not to miss out on any words spoken by a friend across the pond. A pond much larger, though perhaps much smaller, than Walden pond could ever be.

RIAS, again, gives us a chance to catch ourselves listening. Existence incarnated: aesthetics and essence married in an act of silent poetry that does not simply comment upon the (e)ventos, against which human kindness may be the only shield. Embracing the Brazil of Alice Áurea Penteado Martha, Elizabete Sanches Rocha, Ricardo Portella de Aguiar, Virna Ligia Fernandes Braga and Márcio Roberto do Prado, we attune ourselves to a wavelenght beyond the dialectics of similarity and difference. We see our own faces reflected in the mirror of the sea, among the flickers of the sun, turning pages, the once blank sheets of paper. Leminski’s poetry, is very much about listening across the pond: it renders all distance miniscule, yet acknowledges its importance. Reverberating in the distance is an invitation.
Let’s listen.

Distâncias Mínimas
um texto morcego
se guia por ecos
um texto texto cego
um eco anti anti anti antigo
um grito na parede rede rede
volta verde verde verde
com mim com com consigo
ouvir é ver se se se se se
ou se se me lhe te sigo?

Paweł Jędrzejko
RIAS Associate Editor

2016-05-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

International American Studies and the question of World literature. An Introduction

Giorgio Mariani

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

Since its inception, International American Studies (IAS) had to define itself against the larger backdrop of global or world studies. However, as Paul Giles notes in his contribution to this special issue of RIAS marking the 10th anniversary of the journal and devoted to “International American Studies and the Question of World literature,” “World Literature in its current institutional manifestation is a much more recent phenomenon” than IAS, and may have “accumulated academic prestige more rapidly and securely than International American Studies has so far managed.”  Whatever their different temporal and institutional trajectories, however, both IAS and World literature may be seen as efforts to come to terms with the momentous historical, political, social, and technological changes of the past few decades. Put simply, both can be considered attempts to fashion new epistemological tools better suited to making sense of a globalized world, so that, no matter how (relatively?) different their objects of study might be, a set of theoretical concerns would appear to be shared by both fields. Both students of IAS and World Literature, for example, need to venture beyond the traditional categories of the nation and of national cultures, by coming to terms with the social, historical, and linguistic complexities that such a move entails. Both have to do so in a way that “opens” one’s field and yet preserves its raison d’être, especially at a time when the humanities are under attack and the defense of academic positions and credentials—all calls for “interdisciplinarity” notwithstanding—is of paramount importance. Both need to rethink the parameters of their disciplinary specializations, that is, without pulling the institutional rugs from under their feet—a precarious balancing act which, in the age of the corporate university, with its rage for classifying, evaluating, and ranking, is far from easy to perform.

2017-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Figuring Atlantic Legacies: Impossible Archives, Missing Histories, Literary Counter-Memories

Cristina Iuli

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

Cristina Iuli
Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale,
Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici

Figuring Atlantic Legacies: Impossible Archives, Missing Histories, Literary Counter-Memories

Abstract: This paper considers how neo- or trans- Atlantic studies conceives of the Atlantic and its legacies in relation to the idea of the archive, that is, of a body of works related to traces of a trans-Atlantic American past, to its principle of organization and analysis for literary studies, and to the critical descriptions of American Cultures in the context of a long trans-Atlantic network. It addresses how recent works on critical race studies and decoloniality, on performativity and memory and on comparative circum-Atlantic spectrality frame an original way to address how the literary imagination challenges the historical voids produced by modern Western amnesia.

Keywords: trans-Atlantic; archive; critical memory; American literature

2017-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

The Case for a Native American 1968 and Its Transnational Legacy

György Tóth

Language: EN | Published: 23-12-2019 | Abstract | pp. 49-70

Partly as a result of compartmentalized academic specializations and history teaching, in accounts of the global upheavals of 1968, Native Americans are either not mentioned, or at best are tagged on as an afterthought. “Was there a Native American 1968?” is the central question this article aims to answer. Native American activism in the 1960s was no less flashy, dramatic or confrontational than the protests by the era’s other struggles – it is simply overshadowed by later actions of the movement. Using approaches from Transnational American Studies and the history of social movements, this article argues that American Indians had a “long 1968” that originated in Native America’s responses to the US government’s Termination policy in the 1950s, and stretched from their ‘training’ period in the 1960s, through their dramatic protests from the late 1960s through the 1970s, all the way to their participation at the United Nations from 1977 through the rest of the Cold War. While their radicalism and protest strategies made Native American activism a part of the US domestic social movements of the long 1960s, the nature of American Indian sovereignty rights and transnationalism place the Native American long 1968 on the rights spectrum further away from civil rights, and closer to a national liberation struggle—which links American Indian activism to the decolonization movements of the Cold War.

2019-12-23



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

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 Long History of “Doublethink”: A Response to Djelal Kadir’s “Agnotology and the Know-Nothing Party: Then and Now”

Manuel Broncano Rodríguez

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

Manuel Broncano Rodríguez
Texas A&M International University 

The Long History of “Doublethink”: A Response to Djelal Kadir’s “Agnotology and the Know-Nothing Party: Then and Now”

A Response to Djelal Kadir’s “Agnotology and the Know-Nothing Party: Then and Now.” (In the present issue of RIAS).

Keywords: humanities, state control, ignorance, American Literature, World Literature, world culture, American Studies, Comparative Studies

2017-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Hugo Pratt and Milo Manara’s Indian Summer: An Italian “Source” for The Scarlet Letter

Giorgio Mariani

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

Giorgio Mariani
Università “Sapienza” di Roma
Italy

Hugo Pratt’s and Milo Manara’s Indian Summer:
An Italian “Source” for The Scarlet Letter

This paper examines the allusions of Milo Manara’s and Hugo Pratt’s graphic novel, Tutto ricominciò con un’estate indiana (Indian Summer), to Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlett Letter in a variety of ways. In particular, this paper argues that not only some of Pratt and Manara’s characters are very liberal, creative reinventions of Hawthorne’s figures—they might be seen as “spin-offs” of Hawthorne’s narrative—but in many ways Indian Summer is also thematically close to The Scarlet Letter.

2017-11-30



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

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

All Paths Lead to Rome. Establishing an Italian American Archive of the Visual Arts of the late 1950s and early 1960s

Laura Blandino

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

Laura Blandino
University of Turin
Italy

All Paths Lead to Rome.
Establishing an Italian American Archive of the Visual Arts
of the late 1950s and early 1960s

This paper examines the role Rome played in the 1950s as an important outpost for the development of a distinct art scene, where the American and the Italian experience had the opportunity to blend with the artists gathering and sharing innovative ideas. It is a part of an ongoing research and it presents and sums up the early stage of the project which focuses mostly on archival sources and interviews with the central figures of this period. This paper, in particular, follows some of the members of this tran-Atlantic community, focusing in particular on the art galleries that fostered an international dialogue. Above all, this paper addresses the fundamental questions concerning whether this period could be considered as an “archive” of Italian and American art. It aims at demonstrating that, though not altogether free from contradictions and misconceptions, the period under study was very fertile in terms of the results of cross-cultural experience.

2017-11-30



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

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

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

Notes on the Illegal Condition in the State of Extraction. How Not To Be an Informant

Alberto Moreiras

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

We live, increasingly, in a state of extraction. My thesis is that we have not yet figured out the implications of a primary or fundamental logic of state extraction. We have not figured out its implications for our own predicament—for the predicament, that is, not of state functionaries as such, not of extractors and surveyors, which is a predicament of domination, but the predicament of those who would rather not be dominated, and who understand that giving up on domination is the logical price to be paid. These latter figures, those who refuse domination, those who prefer not to be dominated, hence not to dominate, they might in fact constitute the “borders of the border,” that fantastic fringe territory of the human this conference has decided to thematize and, in some sense, to honor. Let me then reserve that theoretical position, the position of border or hyperborder dwellers, to develop what follows. I will claim that the border of the border is today the site where information will not be shared—an opaque site of silence and secrecy, a place of radical reticence concerning unconcealment.

2018-12-30



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

“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

Mending Wall? The War over History in South Korea

Sangjun Jeong

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

Sangjun Jeong
Seoul National University
South Korea

Mending Wall?
The War over History in South Korea

Abstract: Until Korea was divided into North and South in 1945, it had maintained its territorial unity on the Korean peninsula for well over 1,000 years. Then, two young US officers drew an arbitrary line along the 38th parallel. Developing into a heavily militarized zone only several years later, ironically called the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ), that division has lasted for decades and into the present. Recently, several symbolic acts were performed in the zone and innovative plans were suggested to make the land strip into a peace park as a symbol of ideological reconciliation and ecological paradise. Yet to many Koreans, the zone is still inscribed as a wall permanently bisecting the peninsula not only physically but also culturally.  Through an analysis of Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” this article contemplates the divisions within South Korean society over the North –South divide as a war over the telling of history. This history, however told, must be understood alongside the sentiment of han, a Korean word loosely defined as frustration, anger, and sadness, something that has been shaped by centuries of suffering from wars, invasions, colonization, injustice, and exploitation. 

Keywords: Korean Peninsula, Political Divisions, History, War, Demilitarized Zone

2018-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

The Empowerment of American Women during the Great Depression in Comparative Perspective

Maria Luz Arroyo Vázquez

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

Maria Luz Arroyo Vázquez 
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Spain

This paper examines the significant progress that women made during the Great Depression and will focus its attention on the Roosevelt era, a period in which women not only reached key posts in the administration but also managed to acquire a new dignity and social status. Besides, it will try to explore the echo that some of these significant women had across other countries, giving as an example the Spanish case. Roosevelt’s four terms in office (1933–1945) were a clear example of a time when women participated actively in public life. Women were appointed to relevant government positions and played key roles in the development of the Roosevelt Administration. Roosevelt himself and his federal government fostered these expanded roles for women who worked as heads of Federal agencies, as political advisers, in the New Deal’s relief programs, etc. Behind these appointments, we have to highlight the support and compromise of relevant women such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Frances Perkins, Mary Bethune and Molly Dewson, just to mention some of the most inspiring figures during this era. Women worked in two main areas: Democratic Party politics and social welfare. As Susan Ware points out, there was “a network of professional contact and personal friendship that linked the women in top New Deal positions”. In summary, this paper tries to acknowledge and pay tribute to those women, who proved their talent and self-worth and to the ones who were deeply committed with the defence of social reforms and participated actively in politics and social welfare legislation during the Roosevelt era.

2015-11-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Walls that Bridge; or, What We Can Learn from the Roman Walls

Giorgio Mariani

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

Giorgio Mariani
University of Rome “La Sapienza”
Italy

Walls that Bridge;
or, What We Can Learn from the Roman Walls

Abstract: When, during the latest US electoral campaign, Pope Francis criticized Trump’s idea of building a wall between Mexico and the US, reiterating his favorite  point that “we do not need to build walls, but bridges,” the Trump camp retorted that the Pope lives in a city state surrounded by walls, in a city itself surrounded by other walls dating back to ancient Roman times. Why wasn't he concerned with those walls? As one can see, even though Roman walls have completely lost their original function and survive mainly as tourist sites, they also remain powerful political and cultural symbols. The scope of this essay is to offer, from the perspective of an Americanist who was born and raised in Rome, some comparative reflections on  what we can learn today from the history of Roman walls, as well as from their symbolic afterlives.

Keywords: Roman walls, walls as rhetoric, US literature, walls as bridges, walls as dividers

2018-06-30



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

Fence Walls: From the Iron Curtain to the US and Hungarian Border Barriers and the Emergence of Global Walls

Éva Eszter Szabó

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

Éva Eszter Szabó
School of English and American Studies
Department of American Studies
Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest

Fence Walls: From the Iron Curtain
to the US and Hungarian Border Barriers
and the Emergence of Global Walls

Abstract: This paper considers the resurgence of the Iron Curtain metaphor and its appropriateness in relation to the current border barriers in the US and the EU. It addresses the impact of the Iron Curtain both on Eastern Europe and on Western Europe, and it explores the legacy of this nearly hermetically sealed off borderland in the different border security and migration control approaches within the EU in the current era of emerging global walls. In my view, while the Iron Curtain metaphor is mistakenly applied to the current border barriers in the US and the EU alike, its legacy does contribute to the marked difference between Eastern and Western European attitudes and policies to the massive influx of migrants. From the Iron Curtain to the Hungarian border fence, the fence walls of the spatially identical border sections reflect not only the changing concepts of walls, but also the distinct historical experiences with migration. The current border barriers in Hungary and the EU, however, draw on the US–Mexican border barrier that aims to stop unauthorized entry while keeping the gates open in both directions for legal cross-border movement in contrast with the prison walls of the Iron Curtain. 

Keywords: US-Mexican border barrier, Hungarian border fence, unauthorized migration, Eastern Europe, Cold War, Iron Curtain, border walls

2018-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Epilogue—Turning to the Wall: Concepts across Space and Time

György Tóth

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

György Tóth
University of Stirling
Scotland, United Kingdom

Epilogue—Turning to the Wall:
Concepts across Space and Time

Abstract: The epilogue to this journal issue interrogates a variety of aspects of walls as mental structures and tropes of historical memory. Engaging with the issue’s contributing authors, Tóth argues that the idea of the wall functions as metonymy, activating a siege mentality and mobilizing its target audience – hence its rhetorical power and attraction as policy. Discussing the wall’s symbology as a border of the nation state but also pointing out its increasing privatization, the piece concludes with an exploration of the potential that walls may have for the creative subversion of their original function to seal off, categorize and divide humans.

Keywords: commentary, Trump, historical memory, metonymy, art

2018-06-30



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

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

Placing Time, Timing Space. Memory as Border and Line of (Hi)Stories in Richard McGuire’s Graphic Narrative Here

Alice Balestrino

Language: EN | Published: 04-10-2018 | Abstract

Alice Balestrino
Sapienza University of Rome

Placing Time, Timing Space. Memory as Border and Line
of (Hi)Stories in Richard McGuire’s Graphic Narrative Here. 

This article interrogates the Cartesian understanding of time and space in narratives grounded in memorial endeavors. It focuses on the lines that define the interconnectedness between these two dimensions in relation to the introduction of the phenomenological category of memory as a third element providing a perspective on reality and blurring the borders between present and past; here and there. This composite, operative category is tested in the analysis of Richard McGuire’s graphic narrative Here (2014) that, both on the level of the format and on that of the story, outlines the porosity and the ultimate disappearance of the spatiotemporal borders by means of memories. This work conceives of a historical simultaneity that soaks a particular space in its past and of the margins of contingency that separate what pertains to History, what to individual stories and what gets forgotten instead – a representation which is studied against the background of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s speculations on memory in A Thousand Plateaus. 

Keywords: Spacetime as a narrative category, Richard McGuire, Here, The American border

2018-10-04



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Apocalypse Then: Visual Memory and the Transnational Afterlives of the Vietnam/American War

Paweł Jędrzejko

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2025 | Abstract | pp. 5-25

This article examines the global afterlives of the Vietnam/American War through the intertwined lenses of photography, cinema, and Cold War cultural circulation. Beginning with Chris Niedenthal’s iconic 1981 photograph of an armored SKOT before Warsaw’s Kino Moskwa during martial law, the essay analyzes how a contingent act of witnessing became a visual allegory that re-situated the American War within Poland’s own history of repression. Drawing on Barthes’s concepts of studium and punctum, it argues that the image’s enduring force lies in the tension between the photographer’s embodied immediacy and the mythological readings later attached to it. Juxtaposed with globally circulating images such as Eddie Adams’s ­“Saigon Execution” and Nick Ut’s “Napalm Girl,” Niedenthal’s photograph becomes a case study in the transnational migration of wartime imagery and the asymmetries that structure public memory. The essay then turns to Vietnamese, Vietnamese-American, and Vietnamese-Polish literary and artistic archives, highlighting how these testimonies unsettle the dominance of American cinematic narratives that have long framed the war as an American psychological event rather than a Vietnamese historical catastrophe. The conclusion outlines a hemispheric and transoceanic framework for the Review of International American Studies, urging contributors to explore the war’s dispersed legacies as a shared, global archive of memory, representation, and resistance.

2025-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Presidential Address for IASA 8th World Congress, Laredo TX, 12-21 July 2017

Manuel Broncano Rodríguez

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

manuel broncano rodríguez
Texas A&M International University
USA
Presidential Address for IASA 8th World Congress
Laredo TX, 12-21 July 2017
Laredo is located in the vicinity of the Rio Grande/Bravo, in many senses the epitome of the border, of the frontier, of the “limen” in its etymological sense of “threshold,” “doorway,” or “limit.” The general theme of our reunion was “Marginalia: The Borders of the Border,” and the contributions the IASA members made addressed this theme from multiple perspectives, thus leading to most enriching discussions about one of the most written about topics in the scholarship of the last few decades. Such a topic has rekindled new interest, especially in the light of the recent political transformations in many regions of the globe, which are leading to revived feelings of essentialist nationalism and its atavistic fears of the other, call it the immigrant, the dissenter or, if you want, the barbarian. It is happening in Turkey, it is happening in Poland, it is happening in Britain, it is happening in the US. In this context, borders and walls, both physical and ideological, are being erected once again. Marginalia, in turn, is a Latin term that in its origins referred to the inscriptions that monks and other amanuensis made on the empty space surrounding the body of text inscribed on a parchment. Romance languages are largely the product of marginal inscriptions on Latin manuscripts. Thus, the first manifestations of the Spanish language are found in the glosses that monks scribbled on the margins of those manuscripts to clarify and comment on words whose meaning was already obscure for the medieval reader, and those annotations were made in the new romance language, which was nothing but macaronic Latin. By extension, marginalia refers to those writings that do not belong in the canonical body of works of a culture or civilization, and is close in meaning to apocryphal. Furthermore, it can be understood as referring to the interstices that exist between two or more cultures, nations, or religions. In our usage of the term, marginalia refers to those areas of the world that are populated by displaced or uprooted individuals, limbic spaces in which mere survival may become an illegal activity. The present address seeks to explicate the essence of the basic concepts underlying—and driving—the theme of the Congress.

2018-12-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Existential Definition at the End of the American Road

<i>Zabriskie Point</i> (1970), <i>Vanishing Point</i> (1971), <i>The Gauntlet</i> (1977)

James J Ward

Language: EN | Published: 19-12-2021 | Abstract | pp. 121-141

This article discusses three films that helped landmark American cinema in the 1970s. Although differing in inception and reception, all three belong loosely to the genre of the road movie and are linked by protagonists whose stances of rebellion and alienation were characteristic of the counterculture of the 1970s and by the broader theme of existential self-definition that still influences moviemaking today. A critical and commercial failure on its release in 1970, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point has been revalorized as an ambitious attempt to represent the political and cultural conflicts that seemed to be fracturing American society at the time. In contrast, Richard Sarafian’s Vanishing Point soon overcame the disadvantage of studio disinterest and established itself as a cult favorite. Arguably the definitive anti-hero of 1970s cinema, the amphetamine-fueled renegade driver played by Barry Newman achieves iconic stature through an act of defiant self-destruction that still leaves viewers of the film stunned. Finally, Clint Eastwood’s The Gauntlet, in which the actor-director breaks with his ‘Dirty Harry’ persona to depict a burned-out cop who redeems a ruined career, and enables himself a new start, not by making his own law but by enforcing the law on the books, and against all odds. In all three films, the still unspoiled landscape of the American Southwest, crisscrossed by its skein of highways, provides the tableau for escapist fantasies that may in fact be real, for high-speed chases and automotive acrobatics that defy the laws of physics, and for vignettes of an ‘outsider’ way of life that was already beginning to perish.

2021-12-19



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Borders and Vacuums

Paweł Jędrzejko

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

Paweł Jędrzejko
Department of American and Canadian Studies
University of Silesia in Katowice
Poland

Borders and Vacuums

Abstract: Whoever said that the more thresholds we draw, the more marginal spaces we create, was certainly right. The indefinite character of liminality seems to infallibly invite radical solutions: the margin is the locus of the aporia: a non-encounter with a non-language in a non-space. It is there that the Spanish conquistadors located the native peoples of the Americas, construing them as “out of place” in the place in which they had dwelled since the times immemorial; it is there that the thinkers of the Age of Reason would relegate phenomena defying rationalist argumentation or empirical proof, yet undeniably felt as present; it is finally there that individuals driven by empathy end  up today amidst the ruthless political tug-of-war between 21st century nationalisms and progressive advocacy of freedom and equality. The mirage of greatness, poisoning the minds of many, calls into existence discourses of degradation and deprivation; the self-proclaimed “righteous” need a scapegoat to purge their own sins; the necessary condition of “being great” is the legitimization of the fallacy of someone else’s insignificance. with alt-facts ousting hard facts from the public space, with Orwellian media shamelessly creating realities based on the binarity of familiarity and enmity, with all visible attempts to silence the academic humanities, arts and letters by means of massive cuts in funding, the marginalization of those who find the “he who is not with us is against us” philosophy abhorrent gains significant momentum. But it is not in the margins that the monsters awaken: it is in the very heart of the well-defined center that fear rules unchecked while coercion, wearing white gloves, and walking hand in hand with blatant lies that boost fearful egos, facilitates turning a blind eye to cynical oppression, rendering the alleged winners actual victims of their own would-be “greatness.” More thresholds, more limits, all designed to keep the Others out, but all trapping those drawing the demarcation lines within, are being called into existence with increasing speed and intensity; yet the tighter the grip of the stultifying discourse is, the larger the space of the margin, the more obvious the aporias. 

2018-12-30



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

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

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

Riflessi di Guerra. Storia e Antirealismo Nella Narrativa di Viet Thanh Nguyen by Giacomo Traina (A Book Review)

Carlotta Ferrando

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2025 | Abstract | pp. 189-195

Giacomo Traina’s Reflections of War: History and Antirealism in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Fiction (Ombre Corte, 2024) offers a timely and meticulous reassessment of the Vietnam War and its enduring postmemorial legacy. Framed through Viet Thanh Nguyen’s assertion that “all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory,” the study interrogates the competing historical, political, and cultural narratives surrounding the conflict, foregrounding the long-neglected Vietnamese perspective. Divided into two complementary sections, Traina’s volume first reconstructs the complex twentieth-century history of Vietnam, tracing the nation’s descent into war and its aftermath through a Vietnam-centric approach that restores the agency of Vietnamese actors and emphasizes the transnational and multilayered dimensions of the conflict. The second section offers a sustained analysis of Nguyen’s fiction—particularly The Sympathizer (2015)—through the theoretical framework of Critical Refugee Studies, illuminating how Nguyen’s antirealistic narrative strategies challenge imperial historiographies and expose the entanglements of memory, power, and representation within the American cultural imagination. By conceptualizing the Vietnam War as both a physical and metaphorical “war of Vietnams,” Traina situates Nguyen’s work within a broader genealogy of diasporic memory and cultural negotiation, wherein the “war after the war” continues to be fought through competing myths, counternarratives, and postmemorial reimaginings. In bridging historical reconstruction with literary analysis, Reflections of War not only enriches Italian scholarship on Vietnamese American literature but also lays the groundwork for further studies into the transnational reconfiguration of war memory, identity, and narrative form.

2025-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Hemispheric and Transoceanic Narratives of American Travels: An Introduction

Adam Pisarek , Barbara Orzeł

Language: EN | Published: 02-06-2024 | Abstract | pp. 43-51

Hemispheric and transoceanic narratives of American travels originated amidst an almost infinite, multidirectional, transoceanic mobility of people, goods, and lifestyles. Such multiplicity, impossible to reduce to a few organizing principles, defies confinement within any single explanatory framework. To meet this challenge, therefore, we open RIAS to this abundance, taking a step toward the decolonization of the narrative(s) of hemispheric and transoceanic American travels and of thereto related research. Embracing the non-homogeneity of the plethora of the scattered, and sometimes incoherent narratives—whose functions (and functionalizations) change, and whose perspectives vary—we emphasize the polyphony of voices. To decolonize such a multifaceted discourse, in this issue of RIAS we gathered articles which decentralize the conceptualization of travel narratives as necessarily bound with the idea of representation, disentangle the intertwined perspectives from which transoceanic narratives emerge and answer again to the question what it means to travel.

2024-06-02



Journal: Review of International American Studies

The Rebel Behind the Wheel: An Examination of the ‘Redneck’ Rebel Cultural Trope in The Dukes of Hazzard

John Eric Starnes

Language: EN | Published: 19-12-2021 | Abstract | pp. 89-102

The heyday of ‘Redneck’ cinema—the 1970s to early 1980s, saw the rise of the Redneck Rebel—a Southern or otherwise ‘hick’ anti-hero who rode around the countryside like a modern-day cowboy vanquishing evil. His ‘horse’ was his car—a beefed up/souped up muscle car that often became the star of the show and overshadowed the anti-hero himself. This article examines the Redneck Rebel through the lens of one American TV series—The Dukes of Hazzard. This popular 1980s TV series, along with its antecedents and contemporaries, underscore several important points that reinforce typical conservative American virtues: freedom, fighting the ‘good fight,’ an overt heterosexuality, a particular reveling in a sarcastic ‘sticking out the tongue’ at the overly sophisticated, overly arrogant, ‘anti-American,’ and well-heeled parts of American society.

2021-12-19



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

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

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

A New Opening: Presidential Address for the 11th World Congress of the IASA, Katowice, Poland, 7-10 September 2023

Paweł Jędrzejko

Language: EN | Published: 28-08-2023 | Abstract | pp. 5-14

The article opening the present issue is based on Paweł Jędrzejko's "Presidential Address" prepared for the audiences of the 11th World Congress of the International American Studies Association. Offering an insight into the most recent transformations of the IASA and of its journal, the Review of International American Studies, the author of the text pays homage to scholars, whose committment has proven instrumental for the development of the Organization itself, but also for the standing of the RIAS, which enjoys the status of a ranking periodical. The article, essentially historical in its assumptions, indicates the need of the adjustment of the Organization's bylaws to account for the changing academic reality in which it now functions.  

2023-08-28



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

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

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

Inner City Blues

Blues Legacies and the Roots of 1968

Alessandro Buffa

Language: EN | Published: 23-12-2019 | Abstract | pp. 129-140

In this article, I would like to propose an alternative and long view of “1968” which is grounded in black liberation movements, Afrodiasporic cultures, neighborhood-based organizations and sustained and propagated by music and sound. Venturing into this alternative history, I consider the Bronx, Harlem, and Naples, Italy as networks of resistance and nodal junctures for the transmission of Afrodiasporic cultures of opposition. Connecting the mutual influence of global social movements, music and neighborhood-based organizations, my article is also an invitation to start thinking about history through acoustic/musical resonances.

2019-12-23



Journal: Review of International American Studies

As the Digital Teocalli Burns: Mesoamerica as Gamified Space and the Displacement of Sacred Pixels

Joshua Jacob Fitzgerald

Language: EN | Published: 28-08-2023 | Abstract | pp. 259-306

Intricately concocted temples—seemingly historically accurate down to the pixel—flash across the gamer’s screen, as the player-conquistador re-creates the downfall of the so-called “Aztec Empire,” circa 1521, a keyboard at hand instead of a cutlass. Playing the Spanish Conquest has never been easier or more exciting for the victor. Today’s recreational sundering of Indigenous-American sacred spaces and cultural monuments repeats disturbing patterns in colonialism and cultural imperialism from the Early Modern past (Carpenter 2021; Ford 2016; Mukherjee 2017). What are the lessons gamers learn by reducing digitized Mesoamerican temples, such as the grand teocalli of Tenochtitlan, to rubble? This article explores sacred landscapes, archaeology, and art relating to acts of conquest and sixteenth-century Spanish invasion of Mesoamerica. This study of Mesoamerican sacred environments supports my interpretation that careless approaches to early-modern contexts and virtual geographies created by game designers reduce the presence of Mesoamerican place-identity. I highlight empire-building games based on historical events and situate gaming experiences, old and new, as interventions in sacred architecture. The study draws in ethnospatial considerations of settings and ornamentation to furthering the recent Game Studies critiques on cartographies, narratologies, and play mechanics, here focusing on the geo-spiritual components of playing out aspects of Mesoamerica’s encounters with Spanish military and cultural conflict (Lammes et al. 2018). I reveal the importance of place attachment, ethnohistory, and archaeology in making more meaningful experiences and argue that current art history-adjacent gaming agendas create fun and profit at the expense of iconic structures of Mexico’s heritage, such as the Postclassic single- and double-topped teocalli (temple-pyramids). The final thoughts call for increased interventions from scholars upon developer-player negative feedback loops that repurpose inaccurate mythos from historiography of the “Spiritual Conquest” paradigm.

2023-08-28



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Masthead and Table of Contents

RIAS Editors

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

Masthead and table of contents of the issue.

2018-12-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

RIAS Editorial Policy / Stylesheet

RIAS Editors

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

Information for future Contributors to the Review of International American Studies

2018-12-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

“The thin delights of moonshine and romance”: Romance, Tourism, and Realism in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun

Carlo Martinez

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

Carlo Martinez
Università “G. d’Annunzio” di Chieti-Pescara,
Italy


“The thin delights of moonshine and romance”: Romance, Tourism, and Realism in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun

Abstract: Hawthorne’s involvement with the logic of the tourism of his day is a key aspect of his development as a fiction writer. Starting from a discussion of the early sketch “My Visit to Niagara” the article argues that the discourse of tourism, with its protocols and practices, is for Hawthorne a fertile breeding ground and conceptual framework for the elaboration of a new rationale and a new aesthetic for the fiction writing he calls “romance.” It then explores how tourism resonates in the romance which takes it as its central thematic concern: The Marble Faun. Hawthorne’s last completed long work of fiction represents a moment of artistic and personal crisis for the author, who finds his notion of romance writing caught in a sort of double bind created by the touristic nature of his stay in Italy. As the plot of the novel suggests, in his efforts to extricate himself from the situation, Hawthorne, envisioned and experimented with a new kind of writing that led him to revise and alter radically the romance form he had previously elaborated in favor of a much more realistic style of fiction.

Keywords: Nathaniel Hawthorne; Tourism; Italy; The Marble Faun; Romance; Realism

2018-12-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

“The Justest of All Views”: Traveling to Mardi and Beyond with Agnes D. Cannon

Paweł Jędrzejko

Language: EN | Published: 22-12-2024 | Abstract | pp. 5-42

Herman Melville’s Mardi emerges as a pivotal work that bridges the domains of narrative realism and philosophical allegory, reflecting the writer’s evolving artistic ambitions and his quest for truth. This article
examines Melville’s exploration of the poet’s role and literature’s potential as a medium for conveying profound philosophical insights. Drawing on Agnes D. Cannon’s critical framework and Melville’s marginalia, 
the analysis highlights how the writer constructs a multidimensional vision of the artist as entertainer, mouthpiece, interpreter, visionary, savior, and mythmaker. Melville’s poetic philosophy integrates Romantic notions of art’s transformative power with a critical stance on truth, emphasizing the poet’s duty to grapple with both beauty and the sublime while navigating the moral and existential ambiguities of human existence.
By reimagining narrative as an epistemological journey, Melville challenges his contemporaries’ aesthetic expectations and affirms literature’s capacity to inspire intellectual and spiritual growth. This article situates Mardi within 19th-century debates on aesthetics and truth, shedding light on Melville’s literary aspirations and his enduring contributions to the philosophy of art.

2024-12-22



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Collective Trauma and Survival of the Vietnamese Refugees in Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge and The Lotus and the Storm

Özgür Atmaca , Defne Ersin Tutan

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2025 | Abstract | pp. 101-116

This study examines the representations of Vietnam War trauma and the paths taken by the Vietnamese immigrants in the US at the collective level to heal their wounds in Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge and The Lotus and the Storm. Through the analysis of these literary works, the study intends to contribute to the efforts in the field of trauma studies that lay emphasis on the experiences of war survivors who seek refuge in Western nations. In both of Cao’s novels, although the trauma of the Vietnamese in the US is mostly related to their experiences of the war in their homeland, intolerance to the Vietnamese presence in the US, and thus, their marginalization by Americans, impedes the self-healing efforts of the Vietnamese. Despite the challenges they face in their homeland, on their journey to the US and in the US, the Vietnamese do not prefer a life of passivity; instead, they seek to heal their wounds in every possible way.

2025-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Mestizaje y expresiones culturales identitarias en Latinoamérica. Una reflexión sobre el costumbrismo del siglo XIX, la música tradicional y la música pop

Diego H. Franco Cárdenas

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2022 | Abstract | pp. 129-143

Español

La ilustración costumbrista del siglo XIX en Colombia se concentró en la representación de las expresiones culturales nacionales. Desde el análisis iconográfico de dos ilustraciones representativas, realizadas por Ramón Torres Méndez en ese periodo, identificaremos elementos que sirvieron para la construcción de una identidad cultural. Los elementos que conforman dichas expresiones, sin embargo, son el resultado de una mezcla de otras formas de expresión cultural; europeas, americanas y africanas. Este mestizaje, siempre presente, se extiende hasta nuestros días y se puede apreciar en manifestaciones más contemporáneas como el pop, en particular, el movimiento del rock en español en la década de 1990.

English

The costumbrista illustration of the 19th century in Colombia, after independence, focused on the representation of national cultural expressions. From the iconographic analysis of two representative illustrations, made by Ramón Torres Méndez in that period of time, it is possible to identify elements that contribute to the construction of a cultural identity. The elements that make up these expressions, however, are the result of a mixture of other forms of cultural expression, namely European, American, and African. This miscegenation, always present, extends even today and can be seen in more contemporary manifestations such as pop, in particular, of which is the key focus of this article.

2022-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Gaze. An In/Sight

Paweł Jędrzejko

Language: EN | Published: 15-06-2022 | Abstract | pp. 5-15

Desired and abhorred, wished for and fought against, protective and oppressive, surveillance is older than the hills. Since the times immemorial, humans would pray to all-seeing gods in hope that the immortals would watch over them and protect them against perils. Divine protection, however, has always come at a price. Irrespective of the religion, the promise of the deliverance from (variously construed) evil hinges upon the believer’s readiness to dutifully observe gods-given laws. Defiance, impossible to hide from the all-seeing eye, does not only strip one of the “protected” status—it also dooms one to (inevitable) punishment. Why then would anyone choose to transgress? Why not entrust oneself to surveillance if there is nothing sinister to hide? What could be wrong about abiding by the laws? Revisiting some of the essential notions of surveillance studies, this editorial proposes a shift from the concepts explored by Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault to Deleuzoguattarian, post-humanist, perspective on surveillance studies.

2022-06-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Snapshots: On the Value of Photo/Sensitivity

Paweł Jędrzejko

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2022 | Abstract | pp. 5-18

The article offers an comparative insight into two, parallel, narratives concerning a nautical event: one visual, and one verbal.  The argument is based on the juxtaposition of Robert Cushman Murphy's photographic rendition of the so-called Nantucket sleigh ride (the stage of a whale hunt, in which the harpooned animal, attempting to flee his oppressors, tows the whaleboat behind him) with his description of the same phenomenon, which he included in his diary A Logbook for Grace. Whaling Brig Daisy 1912–1913 (first published only in 1947). The reflections stemming from the analysis concern the importance of the Barthesian punctum in the context of the interpretive power of the image, which, ultimately, leads to conclusions concerning the significance of emotions in the hermeneutic process of filling the spots of indeterminacy. Ultimately, the article demonstrates how, through his glass lantern images, Robert Cushman Murphy offers his audiences the “realist” truth, employing “modernist means” to “romantically” emulate the emotions. 

2022-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

The Day After: The Post-Crisis IASA and Daemons That Can Help

(A Farewell Address)

Paweł Jędrzejko

Language: EN | Published: 29-12-2023 | Abstract | pp. 5-15

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

2023-12-29



Journal: Review of International American Studies

On Voyaging and "Bildung" (The Case of Wellingborough/Redburn)

Paweł Jędrzejko

Language: EN | Published: 27-06-2024 | Abstract | pp. 5-27

Paweł Jędrzejko’s reflection on the career trajectories of Americanists from Eastern Bloc countries, including his own, spurs off his autoethnographic account of how sea sailing in Poland became a gateway to the world, leading to his involvement in Melville Studies. His chance encounter with the Polish training ship Zawisza Czarny in the Baltic Sea, marking the beginning of his Americanist journey, becomes a point of departure for a literary analysis, in which the author draws parallels between his own youthful experiences and those of Melville’s character Wellingborough Redburn. Exploring the character’s transatlantic journey in the context of the autobiographical characteristics of the genre of bildungsroman, Jędrzejko analyzes Redburn’s journey from
naïve boyhood to mature identity, emphasizing Melville’s use of Redburn’s voyage to Liverpool as a mirror of his own confrontation with reality, the collapse of inherited ideals, and the development of independent self-awareness. The author highlights the importance of direct (unmediated) experience in the shaping of one’s self-awareness, and poses questions concerning the reliability of narratives as “guides to reality.” By reflecting on the transformative nature of travel and the epistemological shifts it entails, Jędrzejko integrates his personal narrative with broader philosophical inquiries into identity formation, the fallibility of inherited knowledge, and the existential challenges faced by individuals in their pursuit of truth. The text serves as a meditation on the fluidity of discourse and the necessity of embracing uncertainty and impermanence as inextricable determinants of the human condition.

2024-06-27



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

(S)cars: Exploring America's Automotive Self

Paweł Jędrzejko

Language: EN | Published: 19-12-2021 | Abstract | pp. 5-13

The article opens with an autoethnographic account of its author's encounter with the American sense of space in the context of the clash of his own and American cultural norms related to car ownership and car use. The initial anecdotes, in which the negative experiences of the authors lack of knowledge of the essentials of the car culture in the US prove to be instrumental in the process of learning and adaptation, lead to a more profound, historiosophic reflection upon the cars as vehicles of ethics across American cultural history. 

2021-12-19



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Decolonizing Vietnamese Literature: Voices from Within. An Interview with Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Author of Dust Child (2023)

Quế Mai Phan Nguyễn , Mariya Doğan

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2025 | Abstract | pp. 65-77

This interview features Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, an acclaimed Vietnamese author, poet, and translator, whose works explore themes of historical memory, the aftermath of war, and the resilience of family. The conversation delves into Nguyễn’s literary journey and her dedication to decolonizing narratives about Việt Nam. She discusses her novels, The Mountains Sing and Dust Child, both of which weave historical fiction with personal and national history. The interview highlights her approach to storytelling, blending Vietnamese traditions, autobiographical elements, and poetry, and her commitment to amplifying underrepresented voices. This discussion provides an insight into her creative process and the enduring relevance of her work.

2025-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Black Flag under a Grey Sky. Forms of Protest in Current Neo-Confederate Prose and Song

John Eric Starnes

Language: EN | Published: 16-08-2020 | Abstract | pp. 159-181

Abstract: While ‘tragic’ protest and protest songs are normally conceived of as originating on the political left of American culture, in recent years protest from the political right, specifically the racist right has flown under the cultural radar of most researchers of American studies. This article strives to explore the ways in which the neo-Confederate movement is currently protesting the state of cultural, political, and social affairs in the contemporary American South. The neo-Confederate movement is one of the oldest forms of ‘conservative’ protest present in the United States, originating out of the defeat of the Confederacy and the civic religion of the ‘Lost Cause’ of the last decades of the 1800s into the first three decades of the 1900s. Since the neo-Confederate movement is both revolutionary and conservative, it is possible to derive some valuable insights into the contemporary reactionary politics of the right by examining a brief sampling of the protest songs, novels and essays of this particular subculture.

2020-08-16



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Asymmetry of Freedom: Dave Eggers’ Critique of Neoliberalism’s Abuse of the Discourse of Liberty

Mirosław Aleksander Miernik

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2025 | Abstract | pp. 173-188

The article focuses on the discursive use of freedom in the context of neoliberal capitalism in Dave Eggers’ The Circle, A Hologram for the King and The Every. Taking into account the importance of this concept in the context of the American history and national identity, it argues that despite claims that this form of capitalism promotes freedom, it actually privileges economic freedom over personal and political liberties, leading to the rise of inequalities already prophesized by Alexis de Tocqueville. In this context A Hologram for the King emphasizes the discord between the promise of neoliberalism and its practical implementation, which reveals that rather than promote freedom, this form of capitalism establishes structural barriers that obstruct social mobility. With regard to The Circle and The Every, the article analyzes how the eponymous company draws on ideals of freedom in order not only to increase their revenue and monopolize the market, but also establish a digital panopticon that infringes on personal freedoms and privacy, even though the companies themselves operate in secrecy.

2025-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Abstracts and Notes on Contributors

RIAS Editors

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

Abstracts and biographical notes on the Contributors to the feature texts, varia articles and E.Elliott Prize sections of the present issue.

2018-12-30



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

Giving A Face to One's Enemy: A Conversation with Marcelino Truong

Marcelino Truong , Giacomo Traina

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2025 | Abstract | pp. 37-63

This conversation with French illustrator, painter, and author Marcelino Truong retraces his decades-in-the-making artistic journey with a special focus on the historical research informing it. The son of a South Vietnamese diplomat and a French mother, Truong has devoted a trilogy of graphic novels to Vietnam’s tumultuous recent past. The interview, conducted toward the end of 2023, specifically centers on his latest work, 40 Men and 12 Rifles, which recounts the First Indochina War through the eyes of a forcibly enrolled war painter. Among other things, Truong discusses his creative process, the complexities of his mixed heritage, and his motivations for giving a human face to the “other side.”

2025-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Original Pronunciation and the United States: The Case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Paul Meier (2010, 2012)

Emiliana Russo

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2022 | Abstract | pp. 211-231

In 2004 Romeo and Juliet in Original Pronunciation (OP) was staged at Shakespeare’s Globe, inaugurating what Crystal would later define the OP movement (2016) - a movement aiming to restore the original sound of both the literary and non-literary works of the past. While academic literature suggests an irregular theatrical interest in the Shakespearean OP in the UK, it also demonstrates that such restoratory projects have proven increasingly appealing to the US audiences. The reasons why the North American theater goers' are attracted to the Shakespearean OP remain unclear. Based on a qualitative analysis of interviews with Paul Meier, the director of the theatrical and radio production A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2010, 2012) and two of his cast members, and complementing the findings with the study of promotional and non-promotional articles concerning the productions, this paper aims to shed light on the rationale behind the North American fascination with the Shakespearean OP. As Meier’s reflections gravitate towards the identity of the US as a former British colony, this study, relying extensively on literature review, is carried out both through the lens of literary/cultural history and of historical linguistics. Finally, though limited in its scope, this paper intends to pave the way for further studies on the relationship between the allure of the OP and the US culture, and thereby  to enrich the area of investigation concerning Shakespeare's reception in the US and his role in the American culture.

2022-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Bharatanatyam as a Transnational and Translocal Connection: A Study of Selected Indian and American Texts

Manpreet Kaur Kang

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2020 | Abstract | pp. 61-86

Bharatanatyam is a classical dance form derived from ancient dance styles, which is now seen as representative of Indian culture. In India, it is the most popular classical dance form exerting a great impact not only on the field of dance itself, but also on other art forms, like sculpture or painting. The Indian-American diaspora practices it both in an attempt to preserve its culture and as an assertion of its cultural identity. Dance is an art form that relates to sequences of body movements that are simultaneously aesthetic and symbolic, and rooted in specific cultures. It often tells a story. Different cultures observe different norms and standards by which dances should be performed (as well as by whom they should be performed and on what occasions). At the same time, dance and dancers influence (and are influenced by) different cultures as a result of transcultural interactions. Priya Srinivasan’s Sweating Saris: Indian Dance as Transnational Labor is a particularly valuable source wherein its author critically examines a variety of Indian dance forms, especially Bharatanatyam, tracing the history of dance as well as the lived experience of dancers across time, class, gender, and culture. With the help of this text, selected journal articles, and interviews with Bharatanatyam dancers in India and the US, I explore larger issues of gender, identity, culture, race, region, nation, and power dynamics inherent in the practice of Bharatanatyam, focusing on how these practices influence and, in turn, are influenced by transnational and translocal connections.

 

2020-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Perverse Theaters and Refracted Histories: Violence and (Anti)realism in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer

Giacomo Traina

Language: EN | Published: 29-12-2023 | Abstract | pp. 141-158

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

2023-12-29



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Our Death is Our Strongest Surviving Tradition. A Guest Essay by the Artist of Our Cover Image

Ukjese van Kampen

Language: EN | Published: 28-08-2023 | Abstract | pp. 31-47

In Canada, Yukon First Nations are politically powerful and, when viewed by an outsider, everything appears to be progressing well. But the adoption of the Western political model has a downside. We have generally sacrificed our culture for that political power. The loss of our culture has resulted in many social problems and this essay discusses what has resulted from those problems, specifically our high death rate. Ironically, our death ritual, the Potlatch, is one of the strongest surviving cultural traditions we still exercise, while our languages, laws, art, lifestyle, and spirituality are almost all forgotten.

2023-08-28



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Pale Horse, Pale Rider: A Modern Allegory of an Encounter with Death

Navdeep Kahol

Language: EN | Published: 29-12-2023 | Abstract | pp. 105-118

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

2023-12-29



Journal: Review of International American Studies

"Gayl Jones and Travel No-Where"

Wyn Kelley

Language: EN | Published: 27-06-2024 | Abstract | pp. 37-52

Gayl Jones (USA, b. 1949) writes of journeys throughout the Americas, while also, if implicitly, exploring a global African diaspora. Her epic historical novel Palmares (2021) focuses on Brazil, retelling the story of Zumbi, 17th-century Afro-Brazilian leader of a quilombo, or fortified rebel city. Palmares did finally fall to Portuguese colonial militias in 1694-5, and in her book Gayl Jones’s protagonist, Almeyda, then travels to what she hopes will be a new or second Palmares. Her journey, however, frustratingly and paradoxically seems to get her nowhere. But, as we will see, this nowhere reveals the No-Where of Palmarians’ lives, a placelessness that seems uncertain, but at the same time offers freedom, or at least imaginative space. Like legendary “flying Africans,” people who escaped enslavement by leaping into the air, Jones’s characters appear to launch themselves into an unknown, a Not-Know-Where that may take them to Africa or somewhere utterly unanticipated. We can find other versions of this ambiguous travel in Gayl Jones’s drama, The Ancestor: A Street
Play (1975; 2020), and her novel, The Birdcatcher (1986; 2022)—and even in the works of Toni Morrison, whose novels show similar concern with what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation”: attempts to rethink history outside archives and beyond maps.

2024-06-27