Search Results

Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Paul Giles

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

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

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

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

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

2017-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

(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

The Difference that Language Makes: A Response to Paul Giles’ “World Literature and International American Studies: Convergence, Divergence, and Contest”

Cristina Giorcelli

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

Cristina Giorcelli
Facolta' di Lettere e Filosofia
Università degli Studi Roma Tre

The Difference that Language Makes: A Response to Paul Giles’ “World Literature and International American Studies: Convergence, Divergence, and Contest”

A Response to Paul Giles’ “World Literature and International American Studies: Convergence, Divergence, and Contest.” (in the present issue).

Keywords: formation of International American Studies, World Literatures, academic politics

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

US Literature and Italian Culture: A Long Romance (1763-1980)

Cristina Giorcelli

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

Cristina Giorcelli
University of Rome III
Italy

US Literature and Italian Culture: A Long Romance (1763-1980)

This paper attempts to point out the powerful insights and the spirit of adventure of the US literature in the Italian culture, that were sometimes manifested by Italian critics and publishers alike, from (roughly) the end of the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. Today, the great US literary masterpieces are, by and large, part of the Italian heritage, as indicated by the many translations, scholarly books and intelligent, innovative essays that keep being produced and published.

2017-11-30



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

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

American Studies as Italian Theory

Mena Mitrano

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

Mena Mitrano
Loyola University Chicago
JFRC

American Studies as Italian Theory

Considering Roberto Esposito's narrative of Italian Theory, according to which Italian Theory first started as a US-based phenomenon and only later irradiated in other parts of the world, this paper explores the consequences of that narrative and the questions that it might raise for American Studies: Might Italian Theory rightfully belong to the Americanist's domain of inquiry? If so, what impact might it have on the identity of the Americanist? What is an Americanist?  The paper argues that this new wave of theory illuminates the confluence of American Studies and critical thought, both involved in a simultaneous movement of deterritorialization that pushes them outside their established boundaries.

Keywords: American Studies, literary and cultural theory, Italian American Studies, Italian Theory

2017-06-30



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 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

Introduction

Agnieszka Woźniakowska , Anna Łakowicz-Dopiera

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

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

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

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

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

Anna Łakowicz-Dopiera and Agnieszka Woźniakowska

2014-05-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Campo di Fiori, or Walls

Paweł Jędrzejko

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

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

Campo di Fiori, or Walls

Abstract: The present editorial addresses the issue of separation walls as from an ethical standpoint. Walls, metaphorical and physical, offering those (temporarily) privileged protection from the realization of the uncomfortable fact that they stand by while others suffer and die, are supposedly to “keep us free,” although in fact they become a prison of an illusion of safety and a weapon that may sooner or later be used against those who pretend not to hear the noise of the ongoing battle “on the other side.”


Keywords: American Studies, walls, Campo di Fiori, Czesław Miłosz, ethics, separation, isolation, editorial

2018-06-30



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

Sicily, Not Italy

Claudio Salmeri

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

Claudio Salmeri
Faculty of Philology
University of Silesia in Katowice

Sicily, Not Italy

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

2017-11-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Introducing American Multiculturalism in Contexts: Views from Home and Abroad (edited by Sämi Ludwig)

RIAS Editors

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

A brief introduction of the 2017 collection American Multiculturalism in Contexts: Views from Home and Abroad edited by Sämi Ludwig, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2017 (ISBN 10: 1-4438-1691-4; ISBN 13: 978-1-4438-1691-5).

2017-11-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Navigare...

Paweł Jędrzejko

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

Paweł Jędrzejko
Institute of English Cultures and Literatures
Faculty of Philology
University of Silesia in Katowic
Poland

Navigare

Navigare necesse est, vivere non est necesse. This sentence, attributed to Pompeius Magnus, has inspired humankind for generations. Whether it is interpreted literally or metaphorically, the imperative expresses the absolute necessity of movement—irrespective of its motivation—as a condition of the existence of a future. Yet, navigation cannot be simply reduced to movement alone: after all, those who navigate differ from those who are adrift in their ability to actively control their course. As an intentional form of movement, navigation is, in a sense, synonymous to negotiation: to negotiate one’s way through rocks and shoals, one needs to simultaneously demonstrate stamina, sensitivity, and vast knowledge. The mastery of the vessel, its structure, handling, maintenance and maneuverability must go hand in hand with the knowledge of meteorology, trigonometry, cartography, and many other areas of applied science.
      Still, such knowledge alone may not suffice to make port safely. Ships need crews, and thus the navigator must negotiate the ship’s course in yet another dimension: pushing the limits of his or her fellow sailors to warrant the vessel’s survival, the navigator must know when and how to let go to avoid a catastrophe. On board, everyone needs everybody else because everybody depends on everyone else. Importantly, no seafarer should ever forget that a ship is not a discursive structure: it cannot be deconstructed, it cannot be relativized. Its continued existence depends on how well it is maintained and how efficiently it is managed.
      Navigation is thus is both a complex craft and a subtle art, it requires training, experience and an acute awareness of one’s own limitations and the limitations of those with whom one interacts. A navigator is first and foremost a reader and an interpreter: as the reader of the sea, the skies, the landmarks, the reader of the movement of the craft, he or she is also an interpreter of a multitude of languages and other forms of expression in his or her negotiations with people. Navigation, therefore, is a multifaceted challenge.
     Driven by our future projects, we are all in motion. Individually or in small crews, we constantly negotiate our courses, changing headings when necessary, and constantly learning. Still, the longer we sail the liquid expanse of our ever-changing reality, the more palpable our realization of our common condition becomes. Struggling, loving, worrying, joying, mourning, celebrating—we may live in different forecastles, but we really sail the same ship: a multilingual crew of navigators, more and more aware of the fact that we merely seem to be worlds apart. Eliminate the ‘l’ through learning and empathy—and the rest is negotiation of the shared space.
     And negotiate we must: of course, vivere non est necesse, but with us, or without us, the world/word will go on. Navigators ourselves, as teachers and thinkers we have a rare opportunity to train others in hope that the ship of humankind does not turn out to be the Ship of Fools or the Pequod, and that we do not end up in The Raft of the Medusa. We know that jumping ship is only possible when the ship has made port. Living our worrisome lives towards death, our final haven is always too far for us to consider any alternative to sailing on; responding to the universal thump that life democractically gives us, we may choose to follow Melville and negotiate the universal squeeze of the hand instead. Because navigare necesse est. 

Quod erat demonstrandum.

Paweł Jędrzejko
RIAS Associate Editor

2014-11-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

The Quintessence of the Quintessential

Cyraina Johnson-Roullier

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

The Quintessence of the Quintessential

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

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

2016-11-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Directionality/Flow

Paweł Jędrzejko

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

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

Directionality/Flow

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

2017-11-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Dispersing the Field as “Reciprocal Healing”: A Response to Mena Mitrano “American Studies as Italian Theory”

Carlo Martinez

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

Carlo Martinez
Università "Gabriele d'Annunzio,"

Dispersing the Field as “Reciprocal Healing”: A Response to Mena Mitrano “American Studies as Italian Theory”

A Response to Mena Mitrano “American Studies as Italian Theory.” (In the present issue of RIAS).

Keywords: reflexivity, American studies as Italian Theory, literary theory, cultural theory, American Studies, the New Americanists

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

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

Building a Counterarchive: A Response to Cristina Iuli’s “Trans-Atlantic American Studies and the Transatlantic Pedagogies: Some Methodological Perspectives and Questions”

Ugo Rubeo

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

Ugo Rubeo
Dipartimento di Studi Europei, Americani e Interculturali
Università "Sapienza" di Roma
 
Building a Counterarchive: A Response to Cristina Iuli’s “Trans-Atlantic American Studies and the Transatlantic Pedagogies: Some Methodological Perspectives and Questions”

A Response to Cristina Iuli’s “Trans-Atlantic American Studies and the Transatlantic Pedagogies: Some Methodological Perspectives and Questions.” (In the present issue of RIAS).

Keywords: archive, counterarchive, memory, Trans-Atlantic Studies, Cristina Iuli

2017-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

A Timeline of the Decade

Paweł Jędrzejko

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

The article presents a brief history of the Review of International American Studies since its inception until today,

2017-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Regina Schober

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

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

2014-05-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

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

Abandoning America the Better to Save American Studies: A Proposal

Markha Valenta

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

Markha Valenta
Radboud University Nijmegen

Abandoning America the Better to Save American Studies: A Proposal

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

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

2017-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

"This Town Is Against Gender": Bending Gender in Italian Culture

Valeria Gennero

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

Valeria Gennero
University of Bergamo
Italy

“This Town Is Against Gender”: Bending Gender in Italian Culture

This essay describes the misrepresentation of gender theory in Italian culture and politics, arguing that the violence of the attacks unleashed against gender in Italy constitutes a paradoxical example of the importance of a category of analysis that in today’s United States has come to be represented as tame (and even tedious).

2017-11-30



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

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

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

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

The Young Men and the Sea: Sea/Ocean as a Space of Maturation?

Justyna Fruzińska

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

Justyna Fruzińska

Department of American Literature, University of Lodz

The sea (or ocean) in American literature and culture is marked by a distinctive ambiguity. On the one hand, and quite expectedly, the sea voyage can be a maturation experience: such is the case of Humphrey Van Weyden, the protagonist of London’s The Sea  Wolf;  such  is  also  the  interpretation  that the Disney Company chooses to present in its animated adaptation of R.L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island. However, it is also a space of the opposite experience: one that accommodates remarkably immature characters. Be it in the person of captain Delano in Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’, or the eponymous Billy Budd, it is a site welcoming naïve and escapist heroes, those who do not want to or cannot adapt to the demands of land society.

2014-05-15



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

Resistance and Protest in Percival Everett's Erasure

Sonia Caputa

Language: EN | Published: 16-08-2020 | Abstract | pp. 145-157

 As argued by the literary critic Margaret Russett, Percival Everett “unhinges ‘black’ subject matter from a lingering stereotype of ‘black’ style [and] challenges the assumption that a single or consensual African-American experience exists to be represented.” The author presents such a radical individualism in his most admired literary work published in 2001. In Erasure, Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison, the main character and narrator of the book, pens a stereotypically oriented African American novel that becomes an expression of “him being sick of it;” “an awful little book, demeaning and soul-destroying drivel” that caters for the tastes and expectations of the American readership but, at the same time, oscillates around pre-conceived beliefs, prejudices, and racial clichés supposedly emphasizing the ‘authentic’ black experience in the United States. Not only is Erasure about race, misconceptions of blackness and racial identification but also about academia, external constraints, and one’s fight against them. The present article, therefore, endeavors to analyze different forms of resistance and protest in Percival Everett’s well-acclaimed novel, demonstrating the intricate connections between the publishing industry, the impact of media, the literary canon formation and the treatment of black culture.

2020-08-16



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

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

Sostene M. Zangari

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

Sostene M. Zangari
University of Milan
Italy

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

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

2013-11-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

The 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

“Men First, Subjects Afterward”

Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience,” and the Thoreauvian Echoes of 1968 and After

Albena Kouzmanova Bakratcheva

Language: EN | Published: 23-12-2019 | Abstract | pp. 119-128

Thoreau's political reputation in the United States dates from the 1960s when the Americans began to see themselves in a political context. The single most famous fact of Thoreau's life had once been perceived as his going off to Walden Pond in order to drive life into a corner; in the sixties that was superseded by Thoreau's night spent in jail in order to drive the government into a corner. This paper will deal with Thoreau’s impact in both the US and Europe in 1968, as well as two decades later when ‘Civil Disobedience’ became the slogan of the velvet revolutions in Eastern Europe.

2019-12-23



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Traces in the Ocean. On Melville, Wolanowski, and Willing Suspension of Disbelief

Paweł Jędrzejko

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

The present article locates Lucjan Wolanowski’s prose in the space of reflection upon the magical dimension of writing traditionally classified as 'non-fiction' or 'literature of fact'. The magic of 'prose factography' is addressed here both in the perspective of the conditioning of its readerly reception and in the context of the writerly potential of the 'suspension of disbelief'. The argument presented in the article aims at bringing into light the mechanisms responsible for the fusion of the material reality and rhetoric into a faith-based 'magic reality'. The acknowledgment of the role of poetic imagination in the process of shaping the reader’s awareness of the world allows one to observe that the traditional concept of 'the factual' is largely based on a volitional pursuance of the mirage of objectivity and is a product of the craving for certainty. Illustrating the central phenomena of this text with examples of the everyday experience of a Polish reader of 1980s (whose 'factual' knowledge of the world largely depended on the extent of his or her reading in reportage and travel literature), as well as with reference to Herman Melville’s Typee (a novel, which gained wide recognition only after it has been sanctioned as 'non-fiction'), the author of the article seeks to demonstrate how Lucjan Wolanowski’s prose calls into existence a 'factual reality', i.e. a reality, in which one is prone to believe, which one is inclined to take for granted, and which becomes one’s frame of reference in the context of everyday choices. If truth is a function of faith, then fact and magic merge into one and thus inescapably rendering factual reality a 'magical reality'.

2015-05-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

RIAS Editorial Policy and RIAS  Style

RIAS Editors

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

Information for potential contributors.

2017-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Modes and Moves of Protest

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

Nicola Paladin

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

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

2019-12-23



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Money, Power, and Immigrant Sons in Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker: Looking for the American Father

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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

Shirley Geok-lin Lim
University of California,
Santa Barbara
USA

Money, Power, and Immigrant Sons in Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker:
Looking for the American Father

The article explores the convergence of four major American novelistic traditions (the mating-marriage tale, the immigrant story of assimilation and acculturation, detective fiction, and socio-political/socio-economist fiction) in Chang-rae Lee’s acclaimed first novel, Native Speaker (1995), which dramatizes the tragic dynamics between ambition, money, power and moral loss and which offers the reader an insight into a late 20^th century narrative of the formation of the new immigrants in the US, where earlier Euro-and, particularly, Anglo-norms are contested by multicultural, multilingual forces driven by globalized hyper-capitalist superstructures. In this unsettled setting, the common 20^th century master plots of white-as-native tensions with non-white-immigrant-as-the-Other are interrogated, fragmented and re-assembled in a kinetic metropolis of multiple Otherness, in which money and power, two intrinsically intertwined forces, rule. In the novel’s increasingly melodramatic narration of disillusionment, violence and murder, its more primal emotional trajectory arguably is not heterosexual romance, with which the novel begins and ends, but with the quest for a male identity congruent with that generally adopted as a model in the United States. In the novel, male identity is problematized by its embedded contextualization in multiple-tongued, duplicitous and abject ethnic identities, still subordinate or subaltern to white-Anglophone-centric norms. The elder Korean male figures (the father, the political mentor), present in the novel, fail to, or cannot, serve as American fathers. Without fathers able to nurture the immigrant son to a psychologically successful manhood (dramatized as a subject possessing authentic agency with the capacity to sustain intimate and social relationships), the novel’s late 20th century re-inscription of the quintessentially American theme of quest for individual self takes the English language (also allegorized in the figure of the upper-class white wife, Leila) as the sentimental trope by which a national manhood is to be achieved—a post-immigrant salvation that is figuratively and literally articulated.

Keywords: Korean American identity; migrant narratives; acculturation; white Anglocentrism; ethnic agency;  Chang-rae Lee; Native Speaker; money; command of English; manhood; abjection

2016-11-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Presidential Address

Giorgio Mariani

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

Giorgio Mariani's Presidential Address at the 6th World Congress of the International American Studies Association, Szczecin, Poland, followed by the introduction of the central themes of the present issue.

2015-05-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

The ‘Oceanic feeling’ in Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat and S.T. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Claudia Ioana Doroholschi

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

Claudia Ioana Doroholschi

West University of Timisoara, Romania

Stephen  Crane’s  ‘The  Open  Boat’  (1897)  is  a  fictionalized account of the writer’s experience of surviving the shipwreck of the Commodore, a steamboat on which he was heading for Cuba to act as a war correspondent. The present paper will explore Crane’s account of the encounter between man and sea, setting it against the background of S.T. Coleridge’s ‘Rime  of  the  Ancient  Mariner’,  which  Crane’s  story  echoes on several occasions. I will examine the two texts in the light of  the  concept  of  ‘oceanic  feeling’,  as  defined  by  Romain Rolland  and  Sigmund  Freud,  who  both  use  the  metaphor of the ocean as a site of the sublime to speak of a sense of oneness, of connectedness between man and world. I will argue that, while in Coleridge’s poem the Mariner first loses and subsequently recovers a mystical connection with nature, embodied by the connection between man and sea, in Crane’s story the situation is more complex. The short story echoes ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ at key points in the plot, but  seems  to  decode  the  events  in  a  psychological  rather than mystical key. Thus, it seems to suggest that a sense of oneness with nature is not the result of any transcendent connection between man and his surroundings, but merely a  projection  of  the  subject’s  emotions  onto  an  indifferent ature—thus  suggesting  a  psychological  reading  more  consistent  with  Freud’s  than  with  Rolland’s  notion  of  oceanic feeling. Crane’s emphasis on an absurd and indifferent nature in ‘The Open Boat’ has often been read as typical of literary Naturalism. However, I will argue that the ending of the story suggests a return to the Romantic/Rollandian oceanic feeling, and will attempt to untangle the mechanisms and reasons for this reversal. I will also try to account for the allusions to ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ in this context.

2014-05-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Abstracts and Notes on Contributors

RIAS Editors

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

Abstracts and biographical notes on the Authors of feature texts of the issue.

2017-11-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Albena Bakratcheva

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

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

 

2020-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Creolization in Lafcadio Hearn’s New Orleans and Martinique Writings

Hitomi Nakamura Nabae

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

Hitomi Nabae

Kobe City University of Foreign Studies

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

2014-05-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

IASA Statement of Support for the Struggle Against Racialized Violence in the United States

RIAS Editors

Language: EN | Published: 16-08-2020 | Abstract | pp. 291-293

The International American Studies Association is dismayed to see the explosion of anger, bitterness and desperation that has been triggered by yet another senseless, cruel and wanton act of racialized violence in the United States. We stand in solidarity with and support the ongoing struggle by African Americans, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, migrants and the marginalized against the racialized violence perpetrated against them.

As scholars of the United States, we see the killing of George Floyd and many before them as acts on the continuum of the history of the powerful committing racialized violence against the powerless in the United States from before the birth of that country to the here and now of the present day. This continuum stretches from the transatlantic slave trade, the genocide of the indigenous population, the denial of rights and liberties to women, through the exploitation of American workers, slavery and Jim Crow, to the exclusion and inhumane treatment of the same migrants who make a profit for American corporations and keep prices low for the U.S. consumer. As scholars of the United States, we are acutely aware of how racialized violence is systemic, of how it has been woven into the fabric of U.S. society and cultures by the powerful, and of how the struggle against it has produced some of the greatest contributions of U.S. society to world culture and heritage.

The desperate rebellion of the powerless against racialized violence by the powerful is in turn propagandized as unreasonable or malicious. It is neither. It is an uprising to defend their own lives, their last resort after waiting for generations for justice and equal treatment from law enforcement, law makers, and the courts. In too many instances, those in power have answered such uprisings with deadly force—and in every instance, they have had alternatives to this response.

We are calling on those in power and the people with the guns in the United States now to exercise their choices and choose an alternative to deadly force as a response to the struggle against racialized violence. You have the power and the weapons—you have a choice to do the right thing and make peace.

We are calling on U.S. law makers to listen and address the issues of injustice and racialized violence through systemic reform that remakes the very fabric of the United States justice system, including independent accountability oversight for law enforcement.

We are calling on our IASA members and Americanists around the world to redouble their efforts at teaching their students and educating the public of the truth about the struggle against racialized violence in the United States.

We are calling on our IASA members and Americanists around the world to become allies in the struggle against racialized violence in the United States and in their home societies by publicizing scholarship on the truth, by listening to and amplifying the voices of black people, ethnic minorities and the marginalized, and supporting them in this struggle on their own terms.

We are calling on all fellow scholarly associations to explore all the ways in which they can put pressure with those in power at all levels in the United States to do the right thing and end racialized violence.

There will be no peace in our hearts and souls until justice is done and racialized violence is ended—until all of us are able “to breathe free.”

• Dr Manpreet Kaur Kang, President of the International American Studies Association, Professor of English and Dean, School of Humanities & Social Sciences, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, India;
  Dr Jennifer Frost, President of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association, Associate Professor of History, University of Auckland, New Zealand;
  Dr S. Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş, Associate Professor, Department of American Culture and Literature, Hacettepe University, Turkey;
  Dr Gabriela Vargas-Cetina, Professor of Anthropology, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Mexico;
  Dr Paweł Jędrzejko, Associate Professor of American Literature, University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland;
  Dr Marietta Messmer, Associate Professor of American Studies, University of Groningen, The Netherlands;
  Dr Kryštof Kozák, Department of North American Studies, Charles University, Prague;
  Dr Giorgio Mariani, Professor of English and American Languages and Literatures, Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies, Università “Sapienza” of Rome;
  Dr György Tóth, Lecturer, History, Heritage and Politics, University of Stirling, Scotland, United Kingdom;
  Dr Manuel Broncano, Professor of American Literature and Director of English, Spanish, and Translation, Texas A&M International University, Laredo, USA;
  Dr Jiaying Cai, Lecturer at the School of English Studies, Shanghai International Studies University, China;
  Dr Alessandro Buffa, Secretary, Center for Postcolonial and Gender Studies, University of Naples L’Orientale, Italy;

2020-08-16



Journal: Review of International American Studies

“All-Electric” Narratives: Time-Saving Appliances and Domesticity in American Literature, 1945–2020 by Rachele Dini (A Book Review)

Mena Mitrano

Language: EN | Published: 15-06-2022 | Abstract | pp. 143-148

Filomena Mitrano's review of  Rachele Dini's book “All-Electric” Narratives: Time-Saving Appliances and Domesticity in American Literature, 1945–2020, Bloomsbury, 2022.

2022-06-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

The Transpacific Travel from India to Canada in Life of Pi by Yann Martel and Its Link to Transculturality and Transdisciplinarity

Patrick Imbert

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

Patrick Imbert
Univeristy of Ottawa
Canada

The goal is to see how the transpacific travel of the immigrant Piscine from India to Canada in the best seller and Booker Prize novel Life of Pi allows us to revisit the dynamic of exclusion, and the idea of nation and place as well as to recognize alterity in perspectives emphasizing more transculturalism than multiculturalism. This anthropo-thematic analysis will lead us to a theoretical perspective based upon the comparison between trans-multi-interdisciplinary and trans-multi-intercultural perspectives and to establish links between the trans, the multi and the inter in the context of the legitimacy of symbolic and geographic displacements and of multiple encounters as they are linked to the Americas.

2014-11-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Emerson’s Superhero

Giorgio Mariani

Language: EN | Published: 16-08-2020 | Abstract | pp. 27-51

After offering some preliminary remarks on the notion of what makes a “captive mind,” the article shifts its attention to one of the most significant and yet relatively neglected early essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the essay “War.” This text, I argue, deserves not only to be considered the (largely forgotten) founding document of the American anti-war movement, but it remains important even today, as it sheds light on the inevitable contradictions and double-binds any serious movement against war and for social justice must face. It is a text, in other words, which helps us highlight some of the problems we run into—both conceptually and practically—when we try to free our minds from a given mindset, but we must still rely on a world that is pretty much the outcome of the ideologies, customs, and traditions we wish to transcend. To imagine a world free of violence and war is the age-old problem of how to change the world and make it “new” when the practical and intellectual instruments we have are all steeped in the old world we want to abolish. Emerson’s thinking provides a basis to unpack the aporias of what, historically speaking, the antiwar movement has been, both inside and outside the US.  The article concludes by examining some recent collections of US pacifist and anti-war writings, as providing useful examples of the challenges antiwar, and more generally protest movements, must face. 

2020-08-16



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Antonio Barrenechea

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

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

2020-08-16



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Central American Rivers as Sites of Colonial Contestation

Adrian Taylor Kane

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

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

2021-09-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Sara Riccetti

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

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

2024-05-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Peace, War, and Critique

Giorgio Mariani

Language: EN | Published: 29-12-2023 | Abstract | pp. 53-66

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

2023-12-29



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

Masthead and Table of Contents

RIAS Editors

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

Editorial pages and the list of contents of the issue.

2017-11-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Abstracts and Notes on Contributors

RIAS Editors

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

Abstracts and notes on the Authors of feature texts of the issue.

2017-06-30



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

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

Elizabete Sanches Rocha

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

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

Elizabete Sanches Rocha
Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP)
Brasil

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

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

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

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

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

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

2016-05-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Visualizing the Other: Media Representations of Nina Khrushcheva During the Khrushchevs' State Visit to the United States in 1959

Mariya Doğan

Language: EN | Published: 01-05-2024 | Abstract | pp. 143-159

The gender discourse had an important role in the ideological confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union and proved to be an effective weapon of the Cold War. In American imagination, the image of a Soviet woman became an epitome of ‘the other’ which both personified the threat of communism and eased domestic anxieties about rigid gender roles in the post-war US. However, the Cold War was not a homogeneous process. The period from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s referred to as the Khrushchev Thaw, was characterized by attempts of peaceful coexistence between the two superpowers culminating in Khrushchev’s visit to the United States in September 1959. Nina P. Khrushcheva, the wife of the first secretary of the Communist Party, became the first high-rank communist woman to tour the United States with an official visit. The American press took this opportunity to humanize the image of a woman from the other side of the iron curtain and, consequently, defuse tensions on the international stage. Khrushcheva’s visit became a turning point in constructing the image of Soviet femininity, introducing a stereotype of different but not intimidating womanhood. Despite the fact that the fragile hopes for peace between the Western and Eastern Blocs were shattered soon after Khrushchev’s visit, the popular rhetoric of the Soviet femininity was transformed. The present article analyzes the shift in the Soviet gender codes presented in the American newspapers, and puts them into historical context to show how international policies can gain human face in the press.

2024-05-01



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

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

Tadeusz Sławek

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

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

2015-05-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Desiring-Machines, Community Politics and the Threat of Revolutionary Desire in Toni Morrison’s Paradise

Athina Bekou

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2025 | Abstract | pp. 155-172

In their work Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari offer an analysis on the formation of political and economic structures in capitalist societies based on the interpellation of subjects via a system of controlling physical and psychological desires. Their analysis showcases how desire control produces effective labor in a capitalist system, creates psychological massification and achieves political hegemony in a community of interpellated subjects. For the machine of society to function properly, desire needs to be filtered and commodified, otherwise it threatens the system with revolutionary ruptures. In Toni Morrison’s Paradise, the concept of community relates Ruby (a small all-black town cut off from the rest of the world) and the sign of its ontological other, the Convent (a house for wayward women), with the history of racial conflict and the politics of gender. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of how desire politics affect community politics, I attempt to examine how both the interpellating and revolutionary functions of their respective “desiring-machines” lead the communities in Paradise either to decay or evolution. I propose a parallelism between the signs of Ruby and the Convent with the sign of the despotic body (as explained by Deleuze and Guattari) in an attempt to represent the distorting and unifying processes that transform the experiences of both communities. By exploring the restoring flow of desire represented in the dance of the Convent women, I draw attention to the revolutionary changes desire causes in both the physical bodies of the character subjects and the organless bodies of the two communities. As a final point, by applying Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the body without organs to the symbolic spaces of the Oven and the Convent’s cellar, I highlight the linearity of the process of social-production via desire-production.

2025-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

History as an ocean

Alicja Bemben

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

‘But there is a huge difference between writing a historical novel and writing history. If I may put it like this: history is like a river, and the historian is writing about the ways the river flows and the currents and crosscurrents in the river. But, within this river, there are also fish, and […] I am interested in the fish. The  novelist’s  approach  to  the  past,  through the eyes of characters, is substantially different from the approach of the historian’. This quotation might seem to have been taken from some pre-narrative-turn  text  whose  author  appears  to  profess the conviction that the scientific status of history and the fictional character of literature is what makes these two modes of writing about the past essentially different. In fact, these words come from Amitav Ghosh, a contemporary historian, social anthropologist, historical fiction writer who, more than forty years after the Linguistic Turn, seems to advocate a new version of ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’ and literature opposition. Starting with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s arguments in favor of  ‘regional  and  global  configurations  in  modern  history’, I would like to use them to criticize Ghosh’s idea of history as a river and put forward a thesis that history is like an ocean and if we understand it as such, then the boundary between writing a historical novel and history might be considered conventional and possible to be blurred. In order to justify this thesis I intend to provide a series of arguments supported mainly by Hayden White’s philosophy of history presented in Metahistory and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s theory of understanding  from  Truth  and  Method.  In  conclusion,  I  point to  idiosyncrasies  of  the  ocean-like  perspective  on  history as a construct alternative to this proposed by Amitav Ghosh. 



2014-05-15



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

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

Justin Michael Battin , Giacomo Traina

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

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

2025-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Pearl S. Buck and the Forgotten Holocaust of the Two-Ocean War

Valeria Gennero

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

Valeria Gennero

Università di Bergamo, Italy

During the Second World War, Pearl S. Buck was both a successful novelist and an influential political organizer, involved in  well-known  campaigns  against  racism  and  imperialism. In  January  1942  she  published Dragon  Seed,  a  novel  which described the Japanese sack of Nanking in 1937 and engaged the issues of nationalism and male violence from a gendered perspective. Buck wrote the novel before the United States entered the war: she hoped to promote American awareness of  the  Chinese  fight  for  freedom,  knowing  that  the  tragic events which took place in Nanking after the fall of the city were virtually unknown in the United States. I will argue that, despite its original propagandistic intent, Dragon Seed succeeds—as Buck’s novels often do—in problematizing the notion of national identity, foregrounding the sexual politics of war.

 

2014-05-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Ecopoetic Place-Making: Nature and Mobility in Contemporary American Poetry by Judith Rauscher (A Book Review)

Carlotta Ferrando

Language: EN | Published: 29-12-2023 | Abstract | pp. 195-204

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

2023-12-29



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

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

Juliana Nalerio

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

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

2018-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Geographies of Terror: Homecoming and Displacement in Global War on Terrorism Fiction

Angelo Arminio

Language: EN | Published: 01-05-2024 | Abstract | pp. 177-193

This paper analyzes some of the recent literature of the War on Terror—such as Elliot Ackerman’s aptly titled memoir Places and Names (2019) and Phil Klay’s ironically named novel Missionaries (2020)—and explores the spatial dynamics, cultural encounters, and dislocations caused by the series of interrelated conflicts that have characterized the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In doing so, I argue that these narratives highlight the spatially and temporally indefinite nature of the so-called Global War on Terror by portraying displaced civilians and by negating the traditional journey of the soldier, who is instead depicted as incessantly searching for a home in the next war. Using Achille Mbembe’s characterization of contemporary warfare as characterized by war machines (theorized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus) I highlight the way in which war zones are portrayed as the economically significant and self-replicating engines of the global network of power and violence that underlies modern warfare. In this context, the characters of these stories are then depicted as nomadic individuals doomed to perpetually look for their metaphorical home, war itself, across the globe, travelling from one warzone to the next and constituting the threads of a web of smaller conflicts that take place simultaneously, in a seemingly never-ending cycle, around the world.

2024-05-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Revolving the Vortex; or, Working through Trauma at Sea

Pilar Martínez Benedí

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

Pilar Martinez Benedi

Università di Roma ‘Sapienza’, Italy

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

2014-05-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

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

Manlio Della Marca , Uwe Lübken

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

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

2021-09-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Travel for the Dying: Ceauşescu’s Romania as Seen by Saul Bellow

Christopher E. Koy

Language: EN | Published: 01-05-2024 | Abstract | pp. 161-175

Saul Bellow (1915–2005) traveled to Bucharest in December, 1978, to assist his Romanian-born wife who wished to attend to her dying mother. He experienced Bucharest for the first time and realistically conveyed his wife’s humiliating experience with the Securitate of Ceauşescu’s regime in the novel The Dean’s December (1982). This contribution will underscore the anxiety which Bellow experienced writing the novel, leading him to pre-emptive self-censorship, undermining to some extent his brief look inside communist Romania and its people during its repressive years. Bellow followed up that novel 18 years later with a pronounced anti-Romanian take in Ravelstein (2000) in which, among other themes, the youthful fascist past his former university colleague and friend Mircea Eliade is exploited to implicate Eliade in Profesor Ioan Culianu’s murder on campus in 1991. Ravelstein is revealed as a cruel novel impugning a few stand-in Romanian characters, as Bellow exposes his thoroughly modified perspective on Romania.

2024-05-01



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

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

The Philosophy and Practice of Interbeing in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Writing

Monika Kocot

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2025 | Abstract | pp. 117-136

The article looks at the philosophy and practice of interbeing in the writing of the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. Each section discusses a selected aspect of interbeing as taught by Nhat Hanh and practiced by the Plum Village community. “Peaceful Revolution and Building a Community” section introduces a historical look at a collaboration between Nhat Hanh and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s. “The Web of Relationships: The Net of Indra” explores the philosophical depth of the concept of interbeing and its roots in The Avataṃsaka Sūtra. “Interbeing” looks at how the term is applied in Engaged Buddhism. “Interbeing in Historical and Ultimate Dimension” develops some of the insights from previous sections and discusses the practical dimension of interbeing, with numerous references to Nhat Hanh’s books as well as his poems written during and after the Vietnam War.

2025-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Federica Perazzini

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

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

2020-08-16



Journal: Review of International American Studies

“Atom by Atom, All the World into a New Form”: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Theory of Reform

Daphne Orlandi

Language: EN | Published: 29-12-2023 | Abstract | pp. 177-193

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

2023-12-29



Journal: Review of International American Studies

“First in Time, First in Right”: Indigenous Self-Determination in the Colorado River Basin

Paul Formisano

Language: EN | Published: 30-09-2021 | Abstract | pp. 153-175

This article adopts the premise “first in time, first in right” to bring Indigenous knowledge about the Colorado River Basin and the natural world more broadly out of the mainstream’s obscurity to reposition these perspectives at the foreground of the region’s water cultures. To initiate what is in essence a decolonization of Colorado River Basin water knowledge, I examine texts representing various tribal affiliations and genres to consider how their particular use of story engages the historic and ongoing environmental injustices they have faced and continue to negotiate in their fight to preserve their sacred lands, identity, and access to reliable, clean water. Such a decolonization occurs through these texts’ use of narrative to work within and against the scientific and instrumental discourses and their respective genres that have traditionally constructed and dictated mainstream Colorado River knowledge and activity. My treatment of narrative within the Ten Tribes Partnership Tribal Water Study (2018) and the Grand Canyon Trust’s “Voices of Grand Canyon” digital project (2020) sheds greater light on the essential relationships the Basin’s nations and tribes have with the Colorado River. Through these counternarratives to the West’s dominant water ideologies and cultures, the Basin’s tribal nations draw attention to past and ongoing struggles to secure equitable water access while amplifying their resilience and determination that defines their calls for environmental justice.

2021-09-30



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

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

RIAS Editors

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

Call for papers for the 23rd International Conference of the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures University of Silesia in Katowice,
September 20–23rd, 2018,
Szczyrk, Poland

2017-11-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

(A Book Review)

Julia Faisst

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

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

2023-08-28



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

T.S. McMillin

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

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

2021-09-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Gratitude, Resistance, and Mobile Memory in Thuong Vuong-Riddick’s The Evergreen Country: A Memoir of Vietnam

Mattia Arioli

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2025 | Abstract | pp. 79-100

This article discusses how Canada has appropriated the narrative of the Vietnam War to present itself as a progressive country. Specifically, it analyzes how the Land of Maple Leaf co-opted diasporic Vietnamese narratives to promote a nation-building project that exalted the country’s multicultural ideology and fostered its image as a peaceful kingdom. The article also examines how one of the first memoirs written by a Vietnamese Canadian, Thuong Vuong-Riddick’s The Evergreen Country: A Memoir of Vietnam (2007), complicates our understanding of the diaspora by both enforcing and resisting dominant narratives that portray Vietnamese Canadians as emblematic victims and/or successful immigrants who are grateful beneficiaries of liberal freedom, democracy, and wealth.

2025-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Life Matters: The Human Condition in the Age of Pandemics (An Introduction)

Gabriela Vargas-Cetina , Manpreet Kaur Kang

Language: EN | Published: 29-12-2023 | Abstract | pp. 17-28

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

2023-12-29