Search Results

Journal: Review of International American Studies

A Transatlantic Transfer of Cultural Values: Constructing A Canada-Related Cultural Reader Series for the Secondary English Classroom in Central Europe

Mátyás Bánhegyi , Judit Nagy

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

Mátyás Bánhegyi and Judit Nagy
Department of English Linguistics
Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary Faculty of Humanities

The ‘Canada in the English Classroom’ joint research team of the University of Colongne and Károli Gáspár University of the Hungarian Reformed Church has been producing a cultural reader series to enhance the dissemination of up-to-date and engaging cultural information on Canada through general English language classes for the secondary school age group in Central Europe. The cultural reader series is seen as a means of facilitating cultural discourse and cross-cultural learning, also advocated in Canadian contexts by Berrell and Gloet (1999). Using Kramsch’s (1991) and Damen’s (2003) theories, the readers have been devised so that more abstract and/or lesser-known Canadian cultural aspects can be brought closer to the target group through English as a foreign language. To realize this objective in an effective way in the English classroom, Gochenour and Janeway’s (1993) model of culture learning has been observed, which advocates the gradual involvement of students in culture-related issues: starting from observation of culture moving towards genuine communication about culture. After introducing the cultural reader series project briefly, the paper will discuss the theoretical background behind the series and the project activities leading up to the preparation and compilation of its completed volumes. As a next step, an overview of the content of these volumes and the accompanying teacher’s notes will be presented. This will be followed by a sample unit demonstration of how the series achieves the goals the research has targeted.

2014-11-15



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

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

Hospitable Linguistics: Alternative, Indigenous and Critical Approaches to Language Research and Language Encounters edited by Nicholas G. Faraclas, Anna Storch, and Viveka Velupillai (A Book Review)

Monika Grotek

Language: EN | Published: 30-06-2025 | Abstract | pp. 219-224

As the author of this review argues, Hospitable Linguistics represents a radical epistemological and methodological reimagining of language research, foregrounding relational, affective, and decolonial approaches in place of traditional structuralist and extractivist paradigms. The volume reconceptualizes language not as a system to be decoded but as a site of encounter, care, and epistemic risk. Central to its ethos is the notion of “hospitability,” which the editors reframe beyond the Derridean paradox into a lived ethics of recognition, vulnerability, and co-presence—especially in contexts marked by colonial violence and epistemic erasure. Through contributions ranging from Indigenous language revitalization and Afro-Caribbean verbal gesture to sonic border-crossings, knitting as a form of storytelling, and refusal as a mode of speech, the collection expands the field’s boundaries both conceptually and methodologically. The volume prioritizes co-authorship, embodied listening, and non-verbal semiotics as acts of linguistic sovereignty, challenging institutional norms and calling for reparative and relational modes of scholarship. Eschewing synthesis in favor of polyphonic resonance, the book enacts the very hospitality it theorizes. As such, it is not merely a compendium of alternative methods but a manifesto for transforming the ethical foundations of linguistics. This analysis evaluates the volume’s structure, key innovations, and intellectual stakes, proposing that Hospitable Linguistics is indispensable for scholars committed to decolonial, plural, and justice-oriented research in language and culture.

2025-06-30



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 Gift of Languages. Paradigm Shift in US Foreign Language Education by Fabrice Jaumont and Kathleen Stein-Smith (A Book Review)

Monika Grotek

Language: EN | Published: 29-12-2023 | Abstract | pp. 205-223

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

2023-12-29



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

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

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

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

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

Manuel Broncano Rodríguez

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

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

2018-12-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Borders and Vacuums

Paweł Jędrzejko

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

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

Borders and Vacuums

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

2018-12-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

György Tóth

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

György Tóth
University of Stirling
Scotland, United Kingdom

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

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

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

2018-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

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

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

New Wor(l)ds

Paweł Jędrzejko

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

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

Paweł Jędrzejko
RIAS Associate Editor

2014-05-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

“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

“Fires were lit inside them”

The Pyropolitics of Water Protector Camps at Standing Rock

Elizabeth Hoover

Language: EN | Published: 08-09-2019 | Abstract | pp. 11-44

The language of fire has sometimes been used in illustrative ways to describe how social movements spark, flare, and sometimes sputter out. Building on recent scholarship about protest camps, as well as borrowing language from environmental historians about fire behavior, this article draws from ethnographic research to describe the pyropolitics of the Indigenous-led anti-pipeline movement at Standing Rock—examining how fire was used as analogy and in material ways to support and drive the movement to protect water from industrial capitalism. Describing ceremonial fires, social fires, home fires, cooking fires, and fires lit in protest on the front line, this article details how fire was put to work in myriad ways in order to support the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), and ensure social order and physical survival at the camps built to house supporters of the movement. This article concludes with descriptions of how these sparks ignited at Standing Rock followed activists home to their own communities, to other struggles that have been taken up to resist pipelines, the contamination of water, and the appropriation of Indigenous land.

2019-09-08



Journal: Review of International American Studies

PEREGRINAÇÕES TRANSCIBERNÉTICAS

Ricardo Portella de Aguiar

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

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

Ricardo Portella de Aguiar
Universidade Federal Fluminense
Niteroi, Brasil 

"PEREGRINAÇÕES TRANSCIBERNÉTICAS"

O modelo de comunicação adotado nos dias de hoje difere radicalmente do praticado nos séculos passados. Atualmente, a necessidade de interação social tem sido suprida pelo uso e abuso de um espaço disponível a todos que conseguem uma forma de acessar um computador ligado à Grande Rede. Este espaço é composto por inúmeros Territórios Virtuais — Ciberterritórios — povoados por diversas Comunidades igualmente Virtuais dispersas geograficamente, mas interligadas por um poderoso sistema de comunicações, formando o Mundo Virtual. Nesse mundo — viabilizado pela Tecnologia da Informação, pelas redes de telecomunicações e pelos computadores — são praticadas inúmeras formas de linguagem, nos mais bizarros agrupamentos de pessoas sem identificação ou localização precisa, tendo como pano de fundo uma nova forma de escrita inaugurada na era da cibernética — o Texto Digital. Esse Mundo Virtual — emaranhado binário construído sobre artefatos cibernéticos — abriga boa parte do conhecimento e é objeto de desejo do homem contemporâneo: um espaço fruto da imaginação humana, tornado possível através da rigidez de protocolos e da flexibilidade das linguagens da máquina. Um labirinto no qual o tesouro é a entrada para outros incontáveis labirintos. Às peregrinações transatlânticas e transpacíficas se juntou a peregrinação virtual. Através dos infinitos oceanos voamos e nos perdemos; vagamos desnorteados pelos caminhos vertiginosos mantidos pela Linguagem e pela Tecnologia. Diante de cada um dos territórios possíveis na vastidão do Mundo Virtual, perplexos e indecisos por tantas escolhas possíveis, nos fazemos passivos diante da imensidão dos oceanos binários. Esta comunicação é sobre a peregrinação por territórios onde não há limites e não se reconhece o sujeito, porque tudo, lá, é metamorfose. 

Palavras-chave: Internet; Virtual; Cibercultura


"Transcybernetic Pilgrimages"

The communicational model adopted today is radically different from that practiced in the past centuries. The essential human need for social interaction has been transformed by the use and abuse of the space available to all those who have access to a computer linked to the ‘Big Net’. This space, composed of many Virtual Territories, or Cyberterritories, has been called into existence by diverse, and equally virtual, Communities. Geographically disperse, but interlinked within a powerful system of communications, they all make up the Virtual World. In this world—owing to the development of Information Technology that gave birth to telecommunication networks that connect countless individual devices—multiple forms of language develop among the most astounding groupings of people, often without precise identification or precise location, against the backdrop of a new form of writing inaugurated at the onset of the Cybernetic Era—the Digital Text. The Virtual World—a binary tangle built on cyber artifacts—is home to much knowledge and, at the same time, an object of desire of modern man: simultaneously a figment of human imagination and a space made possible by both the rigidity of protocols and the flexibility of machine languages. A maze hiding a treasure which, in itself, is a portal leading us into other, countless, labyrinths. With the birth of the Virtual World, the familiar, albeit uncanny, experiences of the trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific peregrinations have become complemented by the experience of the virtual peregrination. We sail the infinite seas—and therein we become lost; bewildered wanderers, we follow vertiginous trails of Language and Technology. Enchroaching upon each of these possible territories within the vast space of the Virtual World, hesitant, perplexed by the plethora of possible choices, we become passive in the face of the immensity of the binary seas. This article addresses the issue of the peregrinations in the boundless territories recognizing no limitations and no subjectivity: territories in which everything that exists—is a metamorphosis.

Keywords: the Internet; Virtual Space; cyberculture

2016-05-15



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

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

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

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

Steffan Igor Ayora-Díaz

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

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

2020-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Errata

RIAS Editors

Language: EN | Published: 30-09-2021 | Abstract | pp. 273

Erratum for the article: Hoover, Elizabeth. “Fires were lit inside them”. Review of International American Studies, 12 (1/2019), 11-44. https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.7391

The article "The Fires Were Lit Inside Them: The Pyropolitics of Water Protector Camps at Standing Rock" by Elizabeth Hoover, published in the Spring/Summer issue of Volume 12 of RIAS is regretfully missing a citation. Much of the history of the NoDAPL movement on pages 18-19 was drawn from a presentation compiled by Jennifer Weston, a Standing Rock Sioux Tribal member, educator, and language advocate who has been working tirelessly to inform the public about the Standing Rock Dakota Access Pipeline Opposition movement. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

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

Emily Raymundo

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

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

2022-06-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

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

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

Lukáš Perutka

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

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

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

2023-08-28



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Sakina Shakil Gröppmaier

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

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

2020-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

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

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

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

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

Seeing Shadows: The FBI Surveillance of Louise Thompson Patterson

Kiara Sample

Language: EN | Published: 15-06-2022 | Abstract | pp. 89-106

This article explores the ways gender and race influenced the FBI’s surveillance of Black women activists. Previous scholarship has covered the role of surveillance in repressing revolutionary movements and neutralizing radical organizations. Historically, within many social movements, Black women have been marginalized, silenced, or reduced to only their gender because of patriarchal leadership. As a result, the persistence of sexism within these Black movements has affected Black women’s visibility within movement organizations. This piece asks, how does gendered marginalization impact their surveillance by and visibility to the FBI? It seeks to understand the influence of race and gender on the FBI’s surveillance of Louise Thompson Patterson. By examining the language and narrative components of her FBI file, the article provides an analysis across gender and across time to theorize the dynamics of surveillance, race, and gender. Based on a close analysis of Patterson’s FBI file, I argue that the tension between hypervisibility and invisibility deriving from gendered stereotypes resulted in the Bureau’s vague understanding of her personal life and political ideology.

2022-06-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

ENGLISH AS A DEAD LANGUAGE?

Michael Boyden

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

TO BE ADDED

2007-01-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Rethinking the ‘Other’ Border: Caribbean Migration to Canada

Karen Flynn

Language: EN | Published: 29-01-2025 | Abstract | pp. 181-203

This paper challenges the myth of Canada as the “Promised Land” for displaced peoples, such as enslaved African Americans who sought refuge via the Underground Railroad. “Drawing on archival and secondary sources, the paper examines the measures taken by Immigration Canada to exclude Caribbean people, arguing that these policies are inextricably connected to the question of who is considered worthy of belonging to and contributing to the nation-building project. While some recognize that Chinese and Sikh immigrant men furnished the physical labor necessary for nation-building by constructing railways and working in the lumber industry, the bodies and the work performed are gendered. This paper seeks to expand the repertoire of actors and the parameters of what counts as nation-building activities by including Caribbean domestic workers. Specifically, the paper examines how these working-class women both inadvertently and directly contributed to Canada’s nation-building in two ways: 1) by assuming reproductive tasks on behalf of middle-class white women and their families and 2) through their activism against deportation.

2025-01-29



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Remembering Violence in Matar a Jesús (2017)

Laura Fattori

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2022 | Abstract | pp. 95-107

Events that are violent and traumatic in nature entail the breakdown of language and, with it, the conceptual frameworks that construct our social worlds. The inability of reason to articulate this rupture and to conventionally construct meaning implies that the reality of misery and violence can only be suggested (or formulated) through acts of narration that formally and affectively articulate memory into an imaginary. This dislocation of the event from its representation can then only be mapped through the generation and stimulation of affect – which has come to substitute reason as tool for remembering, narrating and, consequently, of mediating our reality. In the present article, the author studies the role of elements that evoke memory and generate the affective dynamics of a traumatic event. Specifically, the author explores the interactions of memory and affect in the process of narrating violence by analyzing objects of memory (such as photographs) that Paula, the protagonist of Matar a Jesús (Killing Jesus (2017) by Laura Mora), utilizes in order to articulate the story of her father’s murder. Further, she claims that the incorporation of filmmaker Laura Mora’s own personal experience as victim of violence points to the fact that the incessant necessity of reformulating trauma and stylizing misery widens the gap between reality and its representation, thus rendering violence unimaginable.

2022-12-31



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

Translocality/Methodology. The Americas, or Experiencing the World

Paweł Jędrzejko

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2020 | Abstract | pp. 5-13

The Americas offer a peculiar stage for translocal methodologies. If we agree that the products of Chinese American culture—which, in the course of the last 170 years of interaction, has evolved into a unique, American, phenomenon—can not be labeled as “Made in China,” then contemporary Chinese medicine in the Americas cannot legitimately be perceived solely as an ‘import.’ Beyond doubt, phenomena such as the emergence of the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine at the California Institute of Integral Studies testify to the fact that the once ‘exotic’ forms of therapy are now being granted a status parallel to those developed throughout the history of Western medicine. Increasingly, as translocal, they are becoming recognized as non-foreign elements of the glocal culture. Similarly, the exploration of the physical world, which, to an experienced dancer of Bharatanatyam, Odissi, or any other of the dominant forms of the classical Indian dance is an obvious function of his or her own experience of the ‘body-in-the-world,’ has, translocally, opened up an altogether new space of profound understanding of ourselves in our environment. It is not about the fashionable, politically correct, ‘openness to other cultures’; it is about the opening up to a parallel meditative experience of the “bodymind,” which neither excludes nor isolates the sphere of emotions from the reality of what-is-being-experienced. Or, to express it in terms more easily comprehensible to a Western reader, dance may prove to be a methodology (not just a method) serving the purpose of a more profound understanding of the complexity and unity of the universe, and a language to express this understanding. Making the most of available traditions might produce much greater benefits than remaining locked within just one, Western, Anglonormative, library of concepts. In the context of the ongoing debate on transnational American Studies, the article offers an insight into how the worldwide studies of the Americas and translocality intersect, and how such a perspective may contribute to the multifaceted process of the decolonization, understood both literally and intellectually.

2020-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Giacomo Traina

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

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

2023-12-29



Journal: Review of International American Studies

"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