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Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Giorgio Mariani

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

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

2017-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

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

Chien-Ting Lin

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

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

Abstract

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

2016-11-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Valeria Gennero

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

Valeria Gennero

Università di Bergamo, Italy

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

 

2014-05-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

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

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

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

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

Giorgio Mariani

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

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

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

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

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

 

2017-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

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

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

Małgorzata Jarmołowicz-Dziekońska

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

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

2025-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Angelo Arminio

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

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

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

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

2022-06-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Peace, War, and Critique

Giorgio Mariani

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

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

2023-12-29



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Giorgio Mariani

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

Giorgio Mariani
University of Rome “La Sapienza”
Italy

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

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

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

2018-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Presidential Address

Giorgio Mariani

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

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

2015-05-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Emerson’s Superhero

Giorgio Mariani

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

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

2020-08-16



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Stefano Luconi

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

Stefano Luconi
University of Naples L’Orientale
Italy

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

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

2017-11-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Mariya Doğan

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

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

2024-05-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Claudia Ioana Doroholschi

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

Claudia Ioana Doroholschi

West University of Timisoara, Romania

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

2014-05-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Mattia Arioli

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

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

2025-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Éva Eszter Szabó

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

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

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

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

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

2018-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Agnotology and the Know-Nothing Party: Then and Now

Djelal Kadir

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

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

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

2017-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

The Discourse of Propaganda: Case Studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror by John Oddo (A Book Review)

Piotr Gumuła

Language: EN | Published: 30-09-2021 | Abstract | pp. 251-256

Piotr Gumuła's review of John Oddo's The Discourse of Propaganda: Case Studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. Pennsylvania State UP, 2018.

2021-09-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Marina Camboni

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

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

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

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

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

2017-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

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

Giorgio Mariani

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

Giorgio Mariani
Università “Sapienza” di Roma
Italy

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

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

2017-11-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Introduction

Molly Geidel , J. D. Schnepf

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

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

2022-06-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Sicily, Not Italy

Claudio Salmeri

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

Claudio Salmeri
Faculty of Philology
University of Silesia in Katowice

Sicily, Not Italy

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

2017-11-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Quế Mai Phan Nguyễn , Mariya Doğan

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

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

2025-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Blue Water. A Thesis

Bruce Robbins

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

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

2015-05-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Modes and Moves of Protest

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

Nicola Paladin

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

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

2019-12-23



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Valeria Gennero

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

Valeria Gennero
University of Bergamo
Italy

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

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

2017-11-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Counter-Revolution, or Authentic Socialism?

The Reactions of the US Left to the Events in Czechoslovakia in 1968

Jan Géryk

Language: EN | Published: 23-12-2019 | Abstract | pp. 27-48

For the majority of Leftists in the 1960s, the Soviet Union ceased to be intellectually and ideologically inspiring. Both Soviet Communism and Western capitalism at that time represented “the System” which offered universal manipulability and universal marketability as its only alternative modes. Thus, the Left searched for authentic socialism, whether in the Marxist-humanist philosophy, in the Third World revolutions, or in the local socialist traditions. However, even though the global Left faced several general problems common to all Cold War worlds, there were also important contextual differences which prevented the common base from further development.
     Following this general context, this article will focus on the Left in Czechoslovakia and in the USA, particularly on the question whether the Czechoslovak reform movement of the late 1960s was inspiring for various groups on the US Left. With regard to the U.S. left-wing reactions to the Prague Spring or to the resistance of Czechoslovak people against the Warsaw Pact invasion, the article will pay attention especially to the discursive dichotomy of authentic socialism vs. counter-revolution.

2019-12-23



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Joyful Tanks Meet Gay Poet. Commemorating Liberation by ‘America’ in the Age of Global War on Terror

Kryštof Kozák

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

This paper explores cultural memory in U.S.-Czech relations as one of the critical factors influencing the bilateral relationship. It argues that it is possible and indeed desirable to move beyond the dominant post-1989 memory discourse of “America” in Czech context. After an introduction that links cultural memory to international relations, it will explore two different commemorative events relevant for U.S.-Czech ties. The first is the official Liberation Festival celebrating 70 years since the U.S. Army entered West Bohemia at the end of WWII. The event is heavy on military symbolism, celebrating U.S. military strength as well as U.S. role as a savior of weaker European countries. The second event is the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Allen Ginsberg being crowned the King of May during the Majales of 1965, a major student celebration in Prague at that time. This commemorative event highlighted aspects of U.S.-Czech cultural memory that are based on shared values of personal freedom as well as a critical stance towards the governing regime. By comparing and analyzing the two case studies, the conclusion offers new perspectives on potential commemorative activities related to U.S.-Czech ties.

2016-11-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

John T. Matteson

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

How does an African-American writer experience Americanness? What does one do when one feels himself born an outcast in one’s own country and then discovers that that country is the only one he can regard as home? Despite—or perhaps because of—his extraordinary gifts, James Baldwin viewed himself as a stranger in America, and his sense of exclusion was threefold, arising not only from his blackness but also from his homosexuality and his identity as an intellectual. At the age of 24, fearing that his life in the United States might soon topple either into violence or a fatal self-contempt, Baldwin traveled to Paris, where he remained for many years. In a superficial sense, Baldwin’s transatlantic life afforded him two homes instead of one. Yet, as his writings confirm, Baldwin’s experiences outside the United States convinced him that he had no true spiritual home anywhere. He could not be truly, comfortably himself in either location. This essay discusses how Baldwin’s European sojourns served to confirm his Americanness — a confirmation he could regard only as bittersweet and tragic. Having observed White Americans both at home and abroad, Baldwin was able to reflect eloquently on the American need to regard itself as somehow exempt from the judgments that hang heavily over the rest of the world. He saw America’s desperate insistence on its own innocence as pervading the nation’s character, whether it was expressed in racial attitudes, foreign policy, or the complex repressions of sexual longing. And that need for exemption circled back to America’s distrust of serious thought and the fear that earnest intellectual labor would tear aside once and for all the mask and myth of American purity. The failure of America, he believed, was a failure of honesty compounded by an incapacity to love. Finding nothing outside of America in which to place his faith, Baldwin placed his profoundly reluctant confidence in the United States. Like Baldwin, we must place our reliance in sympathy, forgiveness, and a rediscovery of common ground. We must, in short, rediscover love, for we, too, have no other place to go.

2023-12-29



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Małgorzata Poks

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

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

2020-08-16



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Campaigning Culture and the Global Cold War: The Journals of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, edited by Giles Scott-Smith and Charlotte Lerg

Deborah Cohn

Language: EN | Published: 23-12-2019 | Abstract | pp. 159-166

A book review of: Giles Scott-Smith, and Charlotte Lerg, editors, Campaigning Culture and the Global Cold War: The Journals of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

2019-12-23



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Central American Rivers as Sites of Colonial Contestation

Adrian Taylor Kane

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

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

2021-09-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Settler Colonialism and Discourses of 'Sacred'

Sandra Garner

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

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



2023-08-28



Journal: Review of International American Studies

A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation by John Matteson (A Pre-Publication Book Review)

Mariola Świerkot

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2020 | Abstract | pp. 221-228

Mariola Świerkot's review of John Matteson's A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation. W.W. Norton & Company 2021. ISBN 978-0-393-24707-7

2020-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Monika Kocot

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

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

2025-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Marietta Messmer

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

Marietta Messmer
University of Groningen
the Netherlands

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

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

2018-12-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Jasmin Habib , Jane Desmond

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

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

2025-02-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

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

John Matteson

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

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

2020-08-16



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Philip Awashish , Jasmin Habib

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

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

2025-01-03



Journal: Review of International American Studies

In Memoriam Marietta Messmer

György Tóth

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

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



2021-12-19



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Navdeep Kahol

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

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

2023-12-29



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Christopher E. Koy

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

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

2024-05-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Gabriela Vargas-Cetina , Manpreet Kaur Kang

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

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

2023-12-29