Search Results

Journal: Review of International American Studies

Posthumanity and the Prison-House of Gender in Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs

Murat Göç-Bilgin

Language: EN | Published: 16-08-2020 | Abstract | pp. 197-213

This article aims to analyze Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs with a deliberate emphasis on posthuman theory, body politics, and gender to construe the transformation of the human body, human-machine nexus, and captivity in inhumanity with a struggle to (re)humanize minds and their bodies. One of the arguments of the paper will be that posthumanism offers a new outlet for breaking the chains of captivity, that is, escaping into non-human to redefine humanity and to emancipate the human mind and human body to notch up a more liberated and more equitable definition of humanity. As gender and sex are further marked by the mechanical and mass-mediated reproduction of human experiences, history, and memory, space and time, postmodern gender theories present a perpetual in-betweenness, transgression and fluidity and the dissolution of grand narratives also resulted in a dissolution of the heteronormative and essentialist uniformity and solidity of the human body. Gender in a posthuman context is characterized by a parallel tendency for reclaiming the possession of the body and sexual identity with a desire to transform the body as a physical entity through plastic surgery, genetic cloning, in vitro fertilization, and computerization of human mind and memory. Therefore, the human body has lost its quality as gendered and sexed and has been imprisoned in an embodiment of infantile innocence and manipulability, a “ghost in the machine,” or a cyborg, a hybrid of machine and organism (Haraway). The human-machine symbiosis, then, is exteriorized and extended into a network of objects switching “natural human body” to an immaterialized, dehumanized, and prosthetic “data made flesh.” In this regard, Coupland’s Microserfs boldly explores the potential of posthuman culture to provide a deconstruction of human subjectivity through an analysis of human and machine interaction and to demonstrate how human beings transgress the captivity of humanity by technologizing their bodies and minds in an attempt to become more human than human.

2020-08-16



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Snapshots: On the Value of Photo/Sensitivity

Paweł Jędrzejko

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

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

2022-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

(A Farewell Address)

Paweł Jędrzejko

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

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

2023-12-29



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Emiliana Russo

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

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

2022-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Paweł Jędrzejko

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

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

2024-06-27



Journal: Review of International American Studies

From Knight Errant to Exploring Pioneer: The Influence of Medieval Romances on the Depiction of Human and Non-Human Others in John Filson’s “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon”

Giulia Magro

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2022 | Abstract | pp. 187-210

This article analyzes, through a comparative approach, a frontier narrative, John Filson’s “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon” (1784), in relation to selected medieval chivalric romances from an ecocritical perspective, exploring the way in which medieval patterns have been employed in the American mythopoeic process, especially in relation to the frontier and the wilderness myths. In fact, medievalist narratives have been often employed to justify an anthropocentric, expansionist, and imperialistic agenda with grievous consequences on the way in which Americans engage with nature and with nonhuman species. At the same time, this tendency is often accompanied by an androcentric and ethnocentric rhetoric, contributing to the marginalization from dominant national discourses of significant sections of the population due to their race and gender. For this reason, attention will be also given to how attitudes toward the nonhuman can reflect and bear an impact on those toward other humans. By investigating how narratives develop, evolve, and circulate across time and space, it becomes possible to reveal the harmful logic they carry, and stress the importance of shifting the narrative in the direction of more sustainable intra- and inter-species relations.

2022-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Gaze. An In/Sight

Paweł Jędrzejko

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

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

2022-06-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Feminist Conspiracies, Security Aunties, and Other Surveillance State Fictions

Patricia Stuelke

Language: EN | Published: 15-06-2022 | Abstract | pp. 51-68

This article investigates two recent fictional representations of the feminized US surveillance state and its “security feminists” (Grewal), with an eye towards limning what visions of social transformation and political life such representations make possible. It first examines Gish Jen’s 2020 novel The Resisters, considering how the novel’s characterization of the US surveillance state as a snoopy suspicious Aunt maintains American liberal fantasies about the value of productive work and institutionally-sanctioned responses to state violence, even as the novel attempts to find grounds for reinvigorating a democratic commons. Jeff Vandermeer’s 2021 novel Hummingbird Salamander, in contrast, is suspicious of democratic visions of the social. Instead, the novel unravels the privatized figure of the “security mom” (Grewal) in order to experiment with how a queer antisocial orientation might confront environmental and institutional collapse and reimagine the idea of “security” itself.

2022-06-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

John Eric Starnes

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

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

2020-08-16



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Introduction

Molly Geidel , J. D. Schnepf

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

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

2022-06-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Knights Across the Atlantic: The Knights of Labor in Britain and Ireland by Steven Parfitt

(A Book Review)

György Tóth

Language: EN | Published: 09-09-2019 | Abstract | pp. 151-156

György Tóth's review of Steven Parfitt's Knights Across the Atlantic: The Knights of Labor in Britain and Ireland. Studies in Labour History, 7. Liverpool
University Press, 2016.

2019-09-09



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

(Introduction)

Małgorzata Poks

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

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

2020-08-16



Journal: Review of International American Studies

American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler, edited by Wai Chee Dimock et al.

(A Book Review)

Fiorenzo Iuliano

Language: EN | Published: 23-12-2019 | Abstract | pp. 167-174

A book review of: Wai Chee Dimock, et. al., editors, American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler. Columbia UP, 2017. 

2019-12-23



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Sin Sick: Moral Injury in War and Literature by Joshua Pederson (A Book Review)

Angelo Arminio

Language: EN | Published: 15-06-2022 | Abstract | pp. 149-154

Joshua Pederson’s Sin Sick: Moral Injury in War and Literature proposes the use of moral injury – a psychological concept describing the affliction of those who break their moral code when committing despicable acts – as a framework through which war narratives of the American War on Terror can be productively read without resorting to the controversial idea of perpetrator trauma, which seems to excuse veterans as victims of the war.

Pederson provides the reader with a clinical overview of the condition as well as a first literary theory of moral injury as a manifestation of various forms of excess through a genealogical reading that includes analyses of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Camus’ The Fall. Sin Sick appears as a step in the right direction as it addresses in a timely manner a blind spot in trauma theory using a concept that more accurately describes a specific type of suffering. In the author’s mind the very term “moral injury” entails an acknowledgement of the soldiers’ wrongdoing, and this allows him to defend contemporary war writers from critics accusing them of using a narrow point of view that focuses on the pain of the American protagonists and hides the suffering of their victims.

Ultimately, the study introduces readers to a fresh way to understand the psychological pain of perpetrators and seeks to inaugurate a new branch of studies that can run in parallel with trauma theory.

2022-06-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

A Road Course in Early American Literature: Travel and Teaching from Aztlán to Amherst by Thomas Hallock (A Book Review)

Nathaniel R. Racine

Language: EN | Published: 19-12-2021 | Abstract | pp. 157-164

Nathaniel R. Racine's review of A Road Course in Early American Literature: Travel and Teaching from Aztlán to Amherst by Thomas Hallock.

2021-12-19



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Travel and the Self in Maggie Shipstead's The Great Circle

Elisa Pesce

Language: EN | Published: 28-06-2024 | Abstract | pp. 123-138

This article presents travel as the nexus between the two protagonists of Maggie Shipstead’s The Great Circle (2021): aviator Marian Graves, whose passion for flight and physical travels double as, and intensify, an inner journey of self-discovery, and Hadley Baxter, a contemporary Hollywood actress who interprets Marian in a biopic and, through this experience, identifies with her, expanding her consciousness and constructing herself as woman. Marian and Hadley have similar, tragic family histories and, despite living a century apart, are both subject to the violence and constraints of a patriarchal society that deprives women of agency and condemns the transgression of gender roles. Consequently, the novel deploys multiple forms of travel and travel writing to ask what it means to be a woman in the United States and explore the contribution of physical and metaphorical journey to the discovery of the self, other people and the world.  While close in scope to canonical male travel narratives, I argue that The Great Circle juxtaposes different stories (Marian’s logbook, a novel and a biography based on it, and Hadley’s movie) and, therefore, different accounts of Marian’s life, to raise questions about the very possibility of knowing anything or anybody. The novel simultaneously denounces women’s objectification by presenting both Marian and Hadley as public figures constructed by others: Marian’s logbook is fictionalised and published without her consent, while Hadley exists only in the characters that she plays and the image that the tabloids project of her. Shipstead’s ambiguous use of the symbolism of the circle further complicates the novel’s epistemological inquiry by betraying expectations about continuity and closure. All circles and journeys in the novel remain open-ended and merge with one another, connecting people and experiences across space and time.

2024-06-28



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Collaborative Futures: Arts Funding and Speculative Fictions

J. D. Schnepf

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2020 | Abstract | pp. 145-157

According to scholars of literary sociology, US arts institutions—from the federal government to the writers’ colony to the creative writing program—have been central to the shaping of US literature for the better part of a century. This paper offers a preliminary investigation of the global crowdfunding platform Kickstarter as an emerging arts institution. Drawing on Kim Stanley Robinson and Marina Abramović’s artistic collaboration as a case study, the paper argues that the appearance of the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI) in Robinson’s novel New York 2140 troubles the author’s stated generic commitments to “realist speculative fiction”—fiction that bases its vision of the future on the state of things in our present. In addition to furnishing uncertain conditions of production for the novel, Kickstarter’s funding model solicits short-form speculative fiction organized around neoliberal selfhood from its artists. With the assistance of Kickstarter’s networked platform, the MAI’s capital campaign reimagined private funding as public performance art, as dutiful civic engagement, and as reward for artists willing to narrate entrepreneurial optimism.


2020-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Ewa Wylezek-Targosz

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

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


2021-12-19



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Traveling Bodies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Traveling as an Embodied Practice, edited by Nicole Maruo-Schröder, Sarah Schäfer-Althaus, and Uta Schaffers (A Book Review)

Julia Szołtysek

Language: EN | Published: 01-05-2024 | Abstract | pp. 241-244

The present review looks at the recent contribution to the Routledge Research in Travel Writing series—Traveling Bodies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Traveling as an Embodied Practice, edited by Nicole Maruo-Schröder, Sarah Schäfer-Althaus, and Uta Schaffers. The review discusses the contents of the volume, the concept and methodology employed in the work, as well as the major aspects pertaining to its position within the broad field of travel writing. It offers an evaluation of the originality of the collection and assesses the quality of the contributions included in the volume, highlighting how the gathered articles enrich the ongoing academic debate on travel, travel writing and the embodied experience of mobility and movement. The present review looks at the recent contribution to the Routledge Research in Travel Writing series—Traveling Bodies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Traveling as an Embodied Practice, edited by Nicole Maruo-Schröder, Sarah Schäfer-Althaus, and Uta Schaffers. The review discusses the contents of the volume, the concept and methodology employed in the work, as well as the major aspects pertaining to its position within the broad field of travel writing. It offers an evaluation of the originality of the collection and assesses the quality of the contributions included in the volume, highlighting how the gathered articles enrich the ongoing academic debate on travel, travel writing and the embodied experience of mobility and movement.

2024-05-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

The Surveillance of Blackness in the Kardashians' Wellness Empire

Heena Hussain

Language: EN | Published: 15-06-2022 | Abstract | pp. 107-125

Keeping up with the Kardashians depicts the lives of the Kardashian clan through reality television. The unparalleled success of five sisters managed by their mother has only continued to increase over time along with their participatory self-surveillance through their formidable use of social media. In recent years, a focus on health and wellbeing has led the sisters to endorse products for weight loss and health, using their bodies as spaces of commodification and advertisement online. The family’s interaction with the camera, and the aesthetics of their social media cross-promotions combine to present an open “honest” front promoting the replication of their success and beauty for their audiences. The sisters engage with blackness in a way that bolsters their claims of capacitating and beautifying white feminine subjects, engagements now commonly termed “blackfishing.” This article analyzes how the Kardashians have created an intense regime of self-surveillance, even dabbling self-consciously in the carceral state's techniques for surveilling blackness, to construct themselves as both uncommonly, exotically sexual ('baring all') and respectable enough (white or white passing) to sell various remedies with dubious health value.

2022-06-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

"What activism can learn from poetry": Lyric Opacity and Drone Warfare in Solmaz Sharif’s LOOK

Keegan Cook Finberg

Language: EN | Published: 15-06-2022 | Abstract | pp. 69-87

The essay explores whether concealing humanness or emphasizing humanness is a more effective strategy for anti-drone activism that seeks to disrupt the conventional epistemologies of militarized surveillance. Building on Édouard Glissant’s decolonizing philosophy of relation and more recent theories of gender and surveillance such as Rachel Hall’s notion of “animal opacity,” the essay argues that poetry is one place we might find an answer to what seems like a binary problem of seeing versus unseeing humanity in technologically mediated aerial warfare. I illustrate that the 2016 poetry collection LOOK by Solmaz Sharif intervenes to suggest activism that steers readers away from the logics of recognition and toward the ethical potential of concealment. LOOK garners formal elements from lyric and experimental poetry traditions to employ a strategy of resistance-looking based in multiple valences of opacity.multiple valences of opacity.

2022-06-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

A Celebration of the Wild. On Earth Democracy and the Ethics of Civil Disobedience in Gary Snyder’s Writing

Monika Kocot

Language: EN | Published: 16-08-2020 | Abstract | pp. 99-122

The article attempts to shed light upon the evolution of Gary Snyder’s “mountains-and-rivers” philosophy of living/writing (from the Buddhist anarchism of the 1960s to his peace-promoting practice of the Wild), and focuses on the link between the ethics of civil disobedience, deep ecology, and deep “mind-ecology.” Jason M. Wirth’s seminal study titled Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis provides an interesting point of reference. The author places emphasis on Snyder’s philosophical fascination with Taoism as well as Ch’an and Zen Buddhism, and tries to show how these philosophical traditions inform his theory and practice of the Wild.

2020-08-16



Journal: Review of International American Studies

"Gayl Jones and Travel No-Where"

Wyn Kelley

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

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

2024-06-27



Journal: Review of International American Studies

A Voyage of Paradoxes. Reconstructing Indian Indenture in the British Caribbean through the Lens of Narratives

Anjali Singh

Language: EN | Published: 01-05-2024 | Abstract | pp. 53-69

The almost century-long system of Indian indenture (1830–1920) initiated by the British after the abolishment of slavery in 1833 displaced 1.3 million Indians who were taken as cheap contract labor to work on the plantation colonies of the Empire. This paper will draw focus on the voyage undertaken by the indentured Indians across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans to the British plantation colonies in the Caribbean. It will deconstruct certain stereotypes and myths about the journey on the ships across the Kala pani (black waters of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans) that have for long been reproduced in the earlier literature written on indenture. The journey of the indentured Indians to the Promised Land, towards the American continent, was paradoxically not for adventure, or for a religious cause, or even to pursue a dream, but was, quite simply, a means to an end. The ship, and by extension, the voyage, would become the site of their coming together, and it is from the ships that would emerge the narratives of their origin. Through a growing body of work across diverse genres of poetry, fiction and prose, the succeeding generations of the indentured people have been engaged in interrogating and reclaiming the indenture experience of their forbears in order to mine the legacies of indenture. This paper will take a closer look at select narratives documenting the invisible and unvoiced ‘her’stories to reveal the several paradoxes surrounding the experience of the transoceanic voyage in indenture.

2024-05-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Pandemic Automobility. Patterns of Crisis and Opportunity in the American Motor Culture

Tomasz Burzyński

Language: EN | Published: 19-12-2021 | Abstract | pp. 143-156

This article traces the recursive character of automobility from a perspective of cultural crises and traumas that accompany motor culture development in the USA. The American automobility system has been caught in the treadmill of ideological criticism that defined the current role of motor vehicles in forms of political activism and cultural criticism. The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is different as it seems to bring restoration to the original character of motor culture with its defining features of individualism, freedom, and opportunity achieved through mobility.

2021-12-19



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Nathaniel R. Racine

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

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

2025-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THE AMERICAN EMPIRE: From Political Fiction to Faction to Fact

Peter Swirski

Language: EN | Published: 01-03-2013 | Abstract

TO BE ADDED

2013-03-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Legacies of Resistance: Emerson, Buddhism, and Richard Wright’s Pragmatist Poetics

Anita Patterson

Language: EN | Published: 29-12-2023 | Abstract | pp. 159-176

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

2023-12-29



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Jasmin Habib , Jane Desmond

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

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

2025-02-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Contextualizing Anti-Vaccination Movements. The Covid-19 Trauma and the Biomedicalization Crisis in the United States

Tomasz Burzyński

Language: EN | Published: 29-12-2023 | Abstract | pp. 89-104

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

2023-12-29



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Manpreet Kaur Kang

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

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

 

2020-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Lacrosse – It’s a Way of Life, dir. Lívia Šavelková, Tomáš Petráň and Milan Durňak, Global Lacrosse Village/Lakrosová vesnice, dir. Lívia Šavelková and Milan Durňak, On the Shore/Na Břehu, dir. Lívia Šavelková and Milan Durňak

(Film Reviews)

Zuzanna Kruk-Buchowska

Language: EN | Published: 28-08-2023 | Abstract | pp. 313-317

Review of: Lacrosse – It’s a Way of Life (2014), directed by Lívia Šavelková, Tomáš Petráň and Milan Durňak, Global Lacrosse Village/Lakrosová vesnice (2015), directed by Lívia Šavelková and Milan Durňak, and On the Shore/Na Břehu (2022), directed by Lívia Šavelková and Milan Durňak

2023-08-28



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Małgorzata Poks

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

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

2020-08-16



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Neither Here nor There: Liminal Spaces and the Vietnam War in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone

Małgorzata Jarmołowicz-Dziekońska

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2025 | Abstract | pp. 137-154

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2016) and Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone (2003) present apparently twofold perspectives on the Vietnam War, but—in fact—they are equally informative sources of dismal reverberations regarding both Vietnamese and American interpretations of the war events. Thus, they construct an unequivocal image of the war, which has turned out to be detrimental for both parties. In this paper, I investigate the liminal state of both protagonists in order to illustrate that the Vietnam War has proved destructive to either participating side. The authors of both novels provide apparently dissimilar portrayals of the war circumstances and its ramifications. However, after a closer examination, accounts which emerge from their narratives seem equally sinister and overwhelming. The concept of liminality, employed as a tool to illustrate the mental state of each protagonist, enables us to capture their “in-betweenness” and allows for investigating their inner passage. Such an approach opens more possibilities for interpretation, since there are interstitial spaces that need to be examined in order to define the characters’ transition. The conceptualization of a British anthropologist, Victor Turner, which inscribes into this theorization, appears indispensable for discerning certain shifts, translocations and transfigurations of the subject in a process of change.

2025-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

“Travelers by necessity” - Ruth Behar on the Way in Search of Roots or Home

Grażyna Zygadło

Language: EN | Published: 27-06-2024 | Abstract | pp. 53-65

Ruth Behar, a Cuban-born immigrant to the US with Polish, Jewish, and Turkish background, begins her memoir Travelling Heavy. A Memoir In Between Journeys, published in 2013, with the following citation “I love to travel. But I’m also terrified of traveling” (3). Later she describes the “various good luck rituals” that she performs before starting a journey such as checking if she has her “Turkish evil eye bracelet,” “a handmade necklace […] to be protected from illness or sudden death” or “rubbing the turquoise glass beads to keep the plane from falling out of the sky” (3). She links all these habits to both her Jewish and Cuban ancestry. And although she calls herself a professional traveler, she also describes herself as a “an anthropologist who specializes in homesickness,” which perfectly reveals the contradictions related to the notion of travelling. As a relatively new phenomenon, available and affordable to few, travelling can be an exciting, desired and adventurous experience that opens us up to diversity and enriches us. At the same time since it involves meeting with the Other it can be a threatening and exhausting incident that causes nostalgia for home. Hence, the journey is an existential experience including the change, the philosophical exploration of oneself, search for and dissemination of knowledge, and a sense of discovery (actual of places and communities and symbolical of cultural values and ideas). In this paper I am going to analyze Behar’s writings as narratives representing fictitious fragments of experienced or/and imagined realities (Letters from Cuba 2020) vs. non-fictional dimension of memoir or travel writing (Travelling Heavy 2013). Still, what joins the two types of narratives is the issue of memory – how/what do we remember? How are our memories changing depending on time and person we relate them to?

2024-06-27



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Between Suspicion and Love. Reality, Postcritique, and Euro-American Modernization (An Introduction to the Debate)

Mena Mitrano

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2020 | Abstract | pp. 185-208

The essay introduces major tenets in the current debate on postcritique, focusing especially on the widespread rejection of symptomatic reading in literary studies and on the rejection of rupture as both a modernist and theoretical model for the conception of the new. Further, it presents theory as a phase of Euro-American modernization. Finally, it outlines a wider, more dynamic concept of critique, understood as a movement of intellectual—and geographical—displacements.

2020-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Human Body, Existence, and Design: An Insight into Yellapragada SubbaRow’s Philosophy

Avani Bhatnagar

Language: EN | Published: 29-12-2023 | Abstract | pp. 119-139

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

2023-12-29