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Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Ulfried Reichardt

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

Ulfried Reichardt
Amerikanistik,
Universität Mannheim

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

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

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

2017-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Paul Giles

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

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

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

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

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

2017-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

(Un)Imagined Shores

Cyraina Johnson-Roullier

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

The theme of the IASA 6th World Congress, ‘Oceans Apart: In Search of New Wor(l)ds’ was a fitting context in which to ask the question how did the Americas become America? And, inversely, how can America be turned inside out to reveal the Americas to which it is ineradicably, albeit perhaps surreptitiously—yet certainly historically—linked, and what might that meanfor our understanding of American Studies as a field? How does the ocean itself, and its boundaryless significance, figure in whatever understanding of America and/or the Americas comes to the fore.The essays included in this issue of the Review of International American Studies each consider this question in very different ways, from the exploration of the role of the ocean in American literature, to that of the power of the ocean’s imaginary reality itself to shape our understanding of that literature. Ever present within these questions is that of the long history of empire embedded in the idea of America and all things American, what exactly that history is to mean, and how it is to be understood, especially when contextualized by the cultural significance of the ocean. With the ocean in mind, in keeping with the Congress theme, the meaning of America seems to radically shift, as the reality of the Americas becomes more evident. As this stable meaning is troubled, as traditional boundaries begin to reform in new configurations, the possibility for new discoveries about the meaning of America comes into greater prominence. But this view from the ocean, with its new perspective on old understandings, doesn’t necessarily have to mean ‘out to sea’.

As Giorgio Mariani asserts, there is often a certain anxiety, even among those, like the members of the International American Studies Association, who adventurously leave their academic and intellectual points of origin to carve out new epistemological roadmaps, leading not infrequently beyond known disciplinary parameters, as these have been structured within the university. What is it about the unboundedness of uncontained knowledge, for which the sea is a striking metaphor, that can hide a subtle yet nonetheless yawning fear? There is the ever-present possibility of drowning, requiring the superhuman control necessary to calmly tread water until a familiar shore appears, rather than using every reserve of energy to flail uselessly about in panic, destroying all possibility of potentially adaptive measures. There is the desire to return to the power of what is known even in the midst of a willful voyage to the unknown, a siren’s song of familiarity slamming shut the door to the new visions that the amorphous reality of limitlessness can invite. But once the idea of treading water is accepted to the point of dictating action, once calm acceptance is allowed to set in, so too does the ocean begin to seem less of an enemy, the mind clears, solutions appear, and direction based on sharpness of thought and intrepid decision takes flight. Previously unthought avenues to understanding open up, and then, new shores. This, then, is the spirit in which the President’s Address and the three plenaries to follow are offered, couple with Paweł Jędrzejko’s fitting examination of Polish literature filtered through an oceanic American literary enounter. Taking America to sea, they are all a compass leading not to what is already known, but to what can be, if we but continue to calmly tread on.

Cyraina Johnson-Roullier
Editor-in-Chief, RIAS

2015-05-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Tadeusz Sławek

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

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

2015-05-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Marina Camboni

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

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

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

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

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

2017-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

The 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

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

Manuel Broncano Rodríguez

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

Manuel Broncano Rodríguez
Texas A&M International University 

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

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

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

2017-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Introduction

Agnieszka Woźniakowska , Anna Łakowicz-Dopiera

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

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

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

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

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

Anna Łakowicz-Dopiera and Agnieszka Woźniakowska

2014-05-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

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

RIAS Editors

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

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

2017-11-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

The Quintessence of the Quintessential

Cyraina Johnson-Roullier

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

The Quintessence of the Quintessential

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

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

2016-11-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Regina Schober

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

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

2014-05-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Navigare...

Paweł Jędrzejko

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

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

Navigare

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

Quod erat demonstrandum.

Paweł Jędrzejko
RIAS Associate Editor

2014-11-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

La novela histórica hispanoamericana  y la reescritura de la historia: Navegantes, historia y escrituras en Vigilia del Almirante de Augusto Roa Bastos

Fabián Gabriel Mossello

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

Spanish-American Historical Novel and the Rewriting of History.
Seafarers, History and Writing in Vigil of the Admiral
by Augusto Roa Bastos
The historical novel in Latin America has contributed much to Latin American historiography. Beginning with the earliest writings by chroniclers, conquistadors and priests, writing has served to comment on the reality of our American world: a world of immense complexity, both in terms of materiality of existence and of intellectual life. The article addresses this complexity with reference to a particular historical novel: Vigil of the Admiral (1992) by the Paraguayan writer Augusto Roa Bastos. The novel offers a rereading of the life of Christopher Columbus, in which the latter’s biography is presented as an alternative version of that adopted by official historiography. The writer highlights scenes of Columbus’s intimate life and populates the narrative with his thoughts, his obsessions, fears and visions of the future in the crucial historical moment when the relationship between the New and the Old Worlds becomes defined.

2015-11-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

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

Introduction

Sonia Caputa , Anna Gonerko-Frej

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

The 6^th World Congress of the International American Studies Association, ‘Oceans Apart: In Search of New Wor(l)ds’, in August 2013 attracted scholars from all over the world to Szczecin, a Polish harbor city with a long multicultural, multinational, and multilingual history. Offering their multidisciplinary perspectives, the participants answered the call of Paweł Jędrzejko (the initiator and organizer) for debate on ‘the transoceanic dynamics of history’. This publication is a collection of papers presented at the conference; the first volume centered on literary topics, and the present one takes a broader, cultural angle, with articles from the world of politics, literature, education, and sociology.

Read more

2014-11-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Paweł Jędrzejko

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

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

2015-05-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Creolization in Lafcadio Hearn’s New Orleans and Martinique Writings

Hitomi Nakamura Nabae

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

Hitomi Nabae

Kobe City University of Foreign Studies

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

2014-05-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

United by the Ocean? The Romantic Conan Doyle and the Transatlantic Sherlock Holmes

Jacek Mydla

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

Jacek Mydla

Department of Literary and Cultural Theory, Institute of English Cultures and Literatures, University of Silesia

Biographers  describe  Sir  Arthur  Conan  Doyle  as  a  ‘Briton enchanted by America’. His letter ‘England and America’ has been  called  a  ‘plea  for  Britons  to  understand  the  American  point  of  view’.  ACD  entertained  utopian  (which  is  not to  say, silly) ideas about the English-speaking part of the world, which made him make efforts to overcome mutual prejudices and to bring the English and the American nations together in terms of friendship. This despite the fact that he had reasons to feel sore due to literary piracies committed against him by American publishers. ACD’s  fascination  with  merica—which  was  for  him, in his own words, a land ‘full of romance’ shows in his greatest and enduring literary achievement: the Sherlock Holmes stories. Already the first of them, ‘A Study in Scarlet’, which in 1887 gave literary life to the now world-famous consulting detective, is set for a significant part of the plot in the U.S. But  ‘transatlantic’  motifs  occur  also  in  other  stories,  most famously in ‘The Five Orange Pips’ (1891), ‘The Yellow Face’ (1893), and ‘The Dancing Men’ (1903). Besides this, a number of other stories contain the motifs and tropes of sea/ocean/voyaging as leading ones, e.g. The story with a ‘whaling’ motif: ‘The Black Peter’.For  ACD  America  was  a  land  on  which  he  projected, as the ‘American’ and ‘voyaging’ stories make evident, his major political and ideological concerns, such as those with justice and equality. In the paper, special attention is paid to the way in which in some of the stories the ocean (also: a sea and a river) features as something like a protagonist, even as one who administers justice and settles other types of account.

2014-05-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Plague, Pestilence, Pandemic: Keywords for a Cultural Epidemiology of the Present

Djelal Kadir

Language: EN | Published: 29-12-2023 | Abstract | pp. 67-88

The Covid 19 era presents yet another instance of the symbiosis between viral pandemic and pestilence in the political culture of the moment. Through a brief reprise of plague-riven history dating from antiquity, this article explores the symptoms of the current epidemic and offers a number of keywords that characterize the current maladies as viral plague and as political pestilence. The coupling of the viral and the political dates from the third century Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius who took the measure of the plague and political corruption of Rome during his reign. The lexical compendium offered here could constitute a study in cultural epidemiology that defines the exhibited symptoms of pandemic disease in its concurrent medical and socio-cultural manifestations.

2023-12-29



Journal: Review of International American Studies

To Staunchly “Remain a Reader” and build up a World Comradeship: Reflecting with Rabih Alameddine on World Literature

Lisa Marchi

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2022 | Abstract | pp. 163-185

What is a classic? To what extent are books and book collections endangered goods? What is the role and meaning of literature and translation in times of hardship? In An Unnecessary Woman (2013), Rabih Alameddine addresses these questions, while also indirectly contesting traditional canonical practices based on rigid hierarchies and the logic of national and linguistic purity. Alameddine highlights the violence inscribed in the practices of book selection and canon formation. In doing so, he troubles received notions of the canon, the classics, and especially of world literature, offering an alternative conceptualization of this long-debated category as an intimate, cosmopolitan assemblage of worldly texts.

2022-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Abandoning America the Better to Save American Studies: A Proposal

Markha Valenta

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

Markha Valenta
Radboud University Nijmegen

Abandoning America the Better to Save American Studies: A Proposal

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

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

2017-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

A Timeline of the Decade

Paweł Jędrzejko

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

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

2017-06-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

The 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

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



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Antonio Barrenechea

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

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

2020-08-16



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Where Stories Are Alive: Traveling into Wolverine’s Territory in Eowyn Ivey’s "To The Bright Edge of the World"

Małgorzata Poks

Language: EN | Published: 30-12-2024 | Abstract | pp. 71-82

In 1885 Lieutenant Colonel Forrester explores the newly acquired territory of Alaska for the US government. His passion to see an unknown world clashes with the mission Forrester has received from his military superiors.
How will he meet the dual challenge—as well as the moral dilemma—of navigating an older world that resists comprehension—a world he learns to respect—and mapping the terrain for potential military invasion?
My analysis will thus attempt to foreground the manifold paradoxes of travel/narratives. Loosely based on Lieutenant Henry Tureman Allen’s historic exploration of the Tanana and Copper rivers, Ivey’s novel departs significantly from historical accuracy in order to bring the colonizing agenda of the government-sponsored exploration party into conversation with the individual perspectives and sensibilities of its members, exposed as they are to a world where old stories are alive and where nonhumans or not-quite humans are all agential
beings. Employing anthropologist Viveiros de Castro’s theorization of Amerindian perspectivism, I want to argue that To the Bright Edge of the World decolonizes the genre of travel narratives as well as the experience of travelling between worlds.

2024-12-30



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

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

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

Alberto Moreiras

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

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

2018-12-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

RIAS Editors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2020-08-16



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

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

“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

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

Daphne Orlandi

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

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

2023-12-29



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

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

Albena Bakratcheva

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

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

 

2020-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

A.K. Ramanujan’s Insightful Observations on Various Aspects of the United States of America. Looking Briefly at the Diary Entries

Jolly Das

Language: EN | Published: 27-06-2024 | Abstract | pp. 87-103

Attipat Krishnaswamy Ramanujan (16 March 1929-13 July 1993) travelled extensively in peninsular India, collecting folktales from rural regions. Since he was already on the move, as a folklorist and as a teacher who taught in several colleges in South India consecutively, it wasn’t difficult for him to set sail for the United States of America when he received the Fulbright Travel Fellowship and Smith-Mundt Grant in 1959, to continue with his studies in linguistics. On 1 July 1959 he boarded the Strathaird in Bombay and undertook a land-journey through France to reach Southampton where he boarded the SS Queen Elizabeth which took him to New York on 28 July 1959. He wrote about experiences and observations during this journey in his “Travel Diary, 2 to 27 July 1959, Bombay to New York”, in the anthology Journeys: A Poet’s Diary (2018).  The first-ever travel overseas, to the US, was full of excitement and anxiety for the young man of thirty. This journey was the initiation for his passage to the country he was to inhabit for the rest of his life, as a teacher in the University of Chicago—a transition from the familiar world (his interior landscape, akam) to the unfamiliar country (the world outside his self, the puram). The article shall focus on Journeys: A Poet’s Diary and A.K. Ramanujan’s unpublished diary to explore his observations and experiences of life in the US. These reveal the way in which his inner self met the new space he entered, followed by his expressing, through his creative and critical self, the interface and intermingling of the two. These travel writings go beyond mere records of observations—they are cultural artifacts left behind by a truly transnational traveler — as a man from a South-Indian milieu; who had been exposed to the British system of education; who was exceptionally intelligent, a poet and critic; and, a keen observer. Theories which engage with the akam-puram paradigm, environment (Buel), culture in a liquid modern world (Bauman) and cosmopolitanism (Appiah) shall be used as tools to analyse and assess the select texts.

 

2024-06-27



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

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

Introduction: On the Concept of Journeying

Beata Gontarz , Anna Maj

Language: EN | Published: 27-06-2024 | Abstract | pp. 29-35

The plethora of existing concepts of journeying, as explored by the authors of articles collected in the present issue of RIAS, reveals the multifaceted nature of travel, irreducible to physical mobility alone. Despite their differences, all forms of travel share common elements, including leaving home, facing risks, stepping out of comfort zones, and encountering logistical challenges, which renders journeying a significant component of existential experience. Involving aporetic encounters with the unfamiliar, travels allow for the deconstruction of stereotypes, offering not only opportunities for the revision of ossified perspectives, but also opening space for philosophical self-exploration. Literature and visual culture throughout different eras have captured these insights, from travel diaries and reports to cartographic works, paintings, photographs, and modern digital media such as travel vlogs and virtual reality. These records reflect the multidimensionality of the “truth” of their times, testifying to the material reality of a given time and place, but also revealing cultural prejudices and the particularities of the dominant discourse of the time. The authors of the texts in this volume reconstruct historical worlds, uncovering new aspects of literature and cultural artifacts, and offering fresh perspectives on travel and journeys as depicted in literary and visual narratives of the Americas since the Spanish Conquest until the first decades of the 21st-century.

2024-06-27



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

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

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

(A Book Review)

Fiorenzo Iuliano

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

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

2019-12-23



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Paweł Jędrzejko

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

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

2024-06-27



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Giulia Magro

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

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

2022-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Cosmopolitanism, Translocality, Astronoetics: A Multi-Local Vantage Point

Gabriela Vargas-Cetina , Manpreet Kaur Kang

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2020 | Abstract | pp. 29-38

The world in which we live is crisscrossed by multiple flows of people, information, non-human life, travel circuits and goods. At least since the Sixteenth Century, the Americas have received and generated new social, cultural and product trends. As we see through the case studies presented here, modern literature and dance, the industrialization of food and the race to space cannot be historicized without considering the role the Americas, and particularly the United States, have played in all of them. We also see, at the same time, how these flows of thought, art, science and products emerged from sources outside the Americas to then take root in and beyond the United States. The authors in this special volume are devising conceptual tools to analyze this multiplicity across continents and also at the level of particular nations and localities. Concepts such as cosmopolitanism, translocality and astronoetics are brought to shed light on these complex crossings, giving us new ways to look at the intricacy of these distance-crossing flows. India, perhaps surprisingly, emerges as an important cultural interlocutor, beginning with the idealized, imagined versions of Indian spirituality that fueled the romanticism of the New England Transcendentalists, to the importance of Indian dance pioneers in the world stage during the first part of the twentieth century and the current importance of India as a player in the race to space. 

2020-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Images to Remember: Nostalgia and Hegemonic Identities in Italia 90: The Movie

Bértold Salas-Murillo

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2022 | Abstract | pp. 109-127

The reconstruction of the past and memory is examined in the feature film Italia 90: The Movie (2014) by Miguel Gómez, which depicts the first participation of a Costa Rican team in a World Cup. The analysis includes the narrative, visual, and sound operations with which the past and memory are recreated (... or created), as well as the ways in which the story involves the viewers, particularly those who remember the episode. It is explained that, although the story resorts to certain topics of sports cinema, it is presented more as an adventure of the community, which would eventually include an entire country, and favors the exploration of the intimate over the epic. Italia 90: The Movie appeals to nostalgia, through recognizable images and sounds, as well as figures anchored in the hegemonic Costa Rican imaginary (such as the “common peasant”), to narrate an episode that, in addition to being central in the history of sports in Costa Rica, it is among the events that symbolically mark the country's entry into the globalized world.

2022-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Manlio Della Marca , Uwe Lübken

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

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

2021-09-30



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Of Cannibals and Witches: Monstrosity and Capitalism at the Onset of Colonial Visual Culture

Gustavo Racy

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2022 | Abstract | pp. 71-94

This article provides preliminary insight into the creation of colonial visual culture. Using visual examples, the author shows how the encounter between European and Amerindian was, at first, apparently deprived of moral judgement, later being increasingly signified through moral and physical monstrosity, especially the female body, which served as an apparatus to assure colonial dominion. Looking mostly at the works of Liègeois artist Theodor de Bry, the author shows how increasing female protagonism may have helped to coin a proper visual culture that mirrored the development of productive force in early capitalism. Assuming that the European colonizer in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was still highly informed by Medieval culture, the author quickly retraces how the New World was imagined through cartography, following to the first depictions of the Amerindian and, finally, focusing on de Bry’s work and an argument on capitalism and how visual culture may help us understand its process.

2022-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Manpreet Kaur Kang

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

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

 

2020-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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

Elisa Pesce

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

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

2024-06-28



Journal: Review of International American Studies

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 Tragedy of a Whistleblower. Adamczewski’s Tragic Protest and the Case of Chelsea Manning

Monika Koltun

Language: EN | Published: 16-08-2020 | Abstract | pp. 215-233

Bringing most carefully guarded secrets into light, political whistleblowers deconstruct the essential oppositions upon which superpower ideologies are founded: they draw popular attention to what has been relegated to the margins of the dominant discourses. Torpedoing the reputations of the most powerful organizations in the world, and well aware of the inevitability of retaliation, they put themselves in a most precarious position. Fighting against impossible odds in the name of the greater good, facing the gravity of the consequences, they become heroes in the classical sense of the word: arguably, their dilemmas are not unlike those faced by Antigone, Hamlet and other iconic figures in history, literature and mythology. Such is the central premise of this article. The methodological frame for the analysis of the material in this study has been adopted from Zygmunt Adamczewski’s The Tragic Protest, whose theory, bringing together classical and modern approaches to tragedy, allows for the extrapolation of the principles underlying the protest of such iconic figures as Prometheus, Orestes, Faust, Hamlet, Thomas Stockman or Willy Loman to discourses outside the grand narratives of culture. His theory of the tragic protest serves as a tool facilitating the identification of the features of a quintessential tragic protester, which Adamczewski attains by means of the study of the defining traits of mythological and literary tragic heroes. It is against such a backdrop that I adapt and apply Adamczewski’s model to the study of materials related to Chelsea Manning in search of parallels that locate her own form of protest in the universal space of tragedy.

2020-08-16