Ableism and the Trump phenomenon

This article argues that Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential campaign was abetted by ableism, both directly, through Trump’s rhetoric, and indirectly, through the ableist culture and infrastructure of the rural, white working-class communities that turned the election for Trump. The article uses Robert McRuer’s account of ‘compulsory able-bodiedness’ to situate Trump’s popularity in relation to the neoliberal policies that have marginalized and stigmatized the white working class, and deploys Lennard Davis’s account of normalcy to explain why Trump’s own bodily difference was widely, and hypocritically, mocked by the left, and also why Trump’s ‘non-normative’ embodiment appealed to his white working-class supporters.     

Where to from here? Blue passports,family, career—and Donald Trump

Abstract

In this essay, we offer our stories of family and migration under a Donald Trump presidency. We are a lesbian couple; one of us is a citizen of the United States while the other is a citizen of a Muslim country. We use autoethnographic methods to explore and interrogate our “messy and fabulous” journey of liminality; our journey of belonging and exclusion, where we grapple with issues related to sexuality, family, career, and citizenship. Our “voices” are used both individually and in unison, to highlight our intersectional and relational selves. We intend this work to contribute to the many ways we can better understand and appreciate the bountiful and colorful vistas of lesbian families’ migrant experiences.     

Trump,proto-presidency,and the rise of sane supremacy

This articles opines that America’s far-Left is sowing the seeds of ‘sane supremacy’: first, by unapologetically tarring President Trump as ‘insane’ for political purposes; and, second, legislating for psychiatry to colonize the White House so as to remove Trump on account of his suspected ‘insanity’. This article deploys an anti-sanist lens and uses the notion of ‘prototypicality’ to show how the regressive far-Left portrays Trump as not meeting the ‘normative’, ‘proto-presidential’ standard. Instead of depicting Trump as mentally unfit, we need to focus on his politics and their effects.     

The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Response to Peak Oil

ABSTRACT

After the two-fold crises of the liberal world order in the first decade of the twenty-first century, including the debacle of the Global War on Terror and the global financial crisis around 2008, we are witnessing a combined crisis of US hegemony and the transnational moment, along with the explosion of populism across the Atlantic world. In this context, this research not only analyses how the United States has designed and maintained the liberal interstate order and globalization but also the way the hegemon proactively starts to destroy its cross-national project today. Therefore, I aim to fathom the future of globalization by interrogating the current US state's key strategies that express America's changing national identity and self-role conception under shifting structural imperatives from unipolarity to the emerging multipolar world.     

Explicating the public memory dialectic in public relations: The case of Donald Trump,The Oath Keepers,and January 6, 2021

The public relations practice participates in making, shaping, telling, and interpreting societal memory to influence issue positions and related actions. That claim implies several themes. One, societal memory is a useful concept for understanding the strategic processes of meaning and meaning making, narratives which constitute society. Two, the content of their prevailing memories shapes the choices individuals make separately and collectively. Public relations’ centrality to societal memory remains an underappreciated and underexplored research area. Scholars have explored the role public relations plays in societal memory by examining, for instance, the textuality of art as well as memorials and statues, their erection and erasure. To better understand this process, scholarship needs to examine strategic public relations efforts to “blur” societal memory as a means of creating alternative versions (revisionist history) of lived truth, values, norms, and policies. After examining memory, including blurring, we use the January 6, 2021 United States presidential election (Congressional Certification) Capitol “protest event” to demonstrate how blurring occurs and its potential adverse implications. We suggest and conceptualize in a model that societal memory occurs as a dialectic; some etched version of history (i.e., thesis) comes under question (i.e., antithesis), and through either a process of blurring, erasure, or retention, that etched history is then muddied, expunged, or lives on (i.e., synthesis). Meaning matters in the enactment and critical assessment of public relations’ role in societal agency.     

Teaching Trump: A Case Study of Two Teachers and the Election of 2016

This case study investigated how two 8th-grade teachers planned for, delivered, and reflected on their teaching of the 2016 Presidential Election. Data sources included classroom observations, teacher interviews, and lesson plans. Despite integrating student-centered lessons about the election with social and political events in US History from1792-1861, one teacher, Ms. Smith, struggled to navigate burgeoning issues that galvanized students. During the six-week unit, both teachers maintained neutral positions on the candidates; however, after the election, Ms. Smith allowed her disdain for Donald Trump to seep into her teaching. Because exigent political events, such as presidential elections, hold great potential to accelerate students' political socialization, more needs to be learned about how teachers do and should manage the teaching of controversial issues in the social classroom.     

Trump and the legacy of a menacing past

The inability to learn from the past takes on a new meaning as a growing number of authoritarian regimes emerge across the globe. This essay argues that central to understanding the rise of a fascist politics in the United States is the necessity to address the power of language and the intersection of the social media and the public spectacle as central elements in the rise of a formative culture that produces the ideologies and agents necessary for an American-style fascism. In this project, education is central to politics, which demands understanding and critically interrogating, in particular, the role of the conservative media in suppressing history, normalizing a discourse of racial hatred, and advancing the most poisonous elements of neoliberalism. The essay calls for a comprehensive notion of politics and education that draws from history, imagines a present that does not imitate the future, and employs a language of critique and hope in the service of building a new broad-based political formation. If fascism begins with language so does the possibility of a radical social imaginary in which to envision a democratic socialist order that both challenges the menacing momentum of a fascist politics and the savagery of neoliberal capitalism.     

Liminal Stigma and Disaligning Activity: Online Comments about Trump's Family Separation Policy

In 2018, the Trump administration initiated a “zero-tolerance” border policy wherein they criminally prosecuted all individuals who were apprehended crossing the border without proper authorization. The policy change resulted in numerous migrant children being separated from their parents. Through a qualitative content analysis of 1500 YouTube comments made in response to CNN and ProPublica news coverage, we examine each side's aligning activity. Separation challengers claimed border crossers were innocent while condemning their opponents as racist, cruel, and otherwise shameful. Separation advocates bolstered their own claims of innocence by denying that the detainees are victims and condemning separation challengers as hypocrites, dishonest, complicit in illegal immigration, and generally loathsome. These findings show that, enabled by social media, aligning activity in stigma contests can produce a liminal stigma, where identities suffer the ideational aspects of stigma but not necessarily the loss of social status.     

In the Streets of San Francisco

The presidency of Donald Trump has occasioned critical repercussions within the field of American Studies around the world. This piece is a response from Germany: a country marked by the historical experiences of fascism and a socialist surveillance state, but a country that, in spite of the liberal pluralistic consensus that grew out of these historical traumata, now has to face a similar development as other Western countries: the rise of new forms of nationalist parochialism, racism coupled with white patriarchal nostalgia and a militant anti-humanism. The rise of a new right, the piece argues, must be regarded as the manifestation of deep insecurities about individual and collective identities which are increasingly defined not on the basis of achievement but on the basis of inheritance. Remembering an instance of ‘hospitality toward a stranger’ in 1979 California, the essay evokes the spirit of cosmopolitanism which, though currently under fierce attack, continues to thrive in the United States, thanks to the commitment of local civil actors, and which needs to be defended by comparatively minded American Studies scholars.     

(Dis)Arming the madman: sane supremacy and the Second Amendment

Abstract

The protection of American mental health consumers’ Second Amendment rights is the ‘mad’ liberation issue of the twenty-first century. Federal laws currently dispossess the differently minded of their Second Amendment access and rights to bear firearms. In response to a spate of school shootings, ‘Red flag laws’ are used in an effort to circumvent mad citizens’ rights to self-preservation and defence. In this article I am proposing neither a political-left nor right side of the aisle position, but rather a bipartisan, anti-sanist stance, where I call for an end to America’s contemporary era of sane supremacy that strips the mad citizenry of their rights to own firearms.     

The End of the World as We Know It?: American Exceptionalism in an Age of Disruption

This essay explores the recent election of President Donald J. Trump against the background of the idea of American exceptionalism. It posits that there have been a variety of versions of the notion of exceptionalism, one of which involves the question, “Why is there no fascism in the United States?” It argues that Trump may render invalid the assumption behind that question and that at best during his tenure we are likely to have a continuation of the “bad exceptionalism” associated with the question, “Why is there no socialism in the United States?”     

The more attacks,the more retweets: Trump’s and Clinton’s agenda setting on Twitter

The present study aims to contribute to the agenda setting theory and political campaign literature by examining candidates’ tweets and their effects on voter reactions in the context of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Content analysis of Donald Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s 3-month tweets (N = 1575) revealed that half of their tweets were attacks, and those attacks were effective in attracting favorites and retweets for both candidates. Their tweets reflected their issue agendas highlighted on campaign websites, and they mainly emphasized issues owned by their parties in both venues. Some of the issues Trump stressed in his tweets (i.e., media bias and Clinton’s alleged dishonesty) drew significantly more favorites and retweets, suggesting public agenda setting possibilities through Twitter. None of the issues Clinton emphasized were significant predictors of favorites and retweets. However, visual elements such as pictures and videos were effective in bringing voter reactions for Clinton. While Clinton sent twice as many tweets as Trump did during the three months, Trump’s tweet received in average three times as many favorites and retweets as Clinton’s. Overall, the results show that Trump was more successful than Clinton in drawing public attention to preferred issues through Twitter.     

Transnational Feminisms in a New Global Matrix

Utilizing an ethnographic case-study approach, this article examines the experiences of women of color encountering globalization, and the shifting political and economic landscape through forms of transnational organizing.

Central to this analysis is an examination of the increased pressures born by women of color and the emergence of new strategies of resistance that move outside nationalist and state-centered models. The article highlights such alliances between a group of US Chicanas and Latinas from Colorado, and indigenous women in Chiapas, Mexico, paying particular attention to the transformative relationships as well as the points of tension and disruption.

Overall, the article brings into conversation theories of oppositional consciousness among US ‘Third World Feminists’ and postcolonial feminist critiques of globalization to map the boundaries of a transnational feminism useful for women encountering hierarchies of race, class and gender in the new millennium.     

The Pitfall Facing the Cool Japan Project: The Transnational Development of the Anime Industry under the Condition of Post‐Fordism*

This paper examines the way in which the anime industry has developed since the mid‐1960s, by looking at transnational production systems and the international division of labor. First, it tries to demonstrate that anime, though seen both as a cultural product originating from Japan and as an export within the recent Cool Japan project promoted by the Japanese government, has, from the beginning of its history, been a very hybridized product due to the transnational production system, in particular among Japan, Korea and China. Second, the paper also shows how this transnational production system has led to the lasting poor labor conditions suffered by Japanese animators, one of the prototypes for freeters in the 1990s. Third, by examining the anime promotion policy led by the Chinese government, I would like to discuss the possible future of anime production systems in the age of digital production in Asia.     

Spicing Up a 150-Year-Old Porcelain Factory: Art,Localism and Transnationalism in Arita's Happy Lucky Kiln

The Kouraku Kiln, a 150-year-old Japanese porcelain factory in the traditional rural pottery town of Arita, has been struggling with the economic decline brought by the burst of the bubble in the mid-1990s, rural migration and changes in lifestyle and tastes. Using ethnographic fieldwork, I look at the independent innovative activities that the Kouraku Kiln factory has put into place to overcome such problems: an artist-in-residence program and a treasure hunt, both coordinated by Brazilian ceramic artist and cultural agitator Sebastião Pimenta. By making use of the local history, identity, and infrastructure to attract visitors from all over the world to the production site, Kouraku Kiln has changed its focus from its products by selling knowledge and experiences. Besides contributing to the revitalization of the local economy, the constant presence of Pimenta and other international artists at the factory has added to the creation of multicultural exchanges in the local community, raising issues about social integration and local citizenship. With this case study, I aim to add to discussions about the revitalization of rural places and the regeneration of Japanese traditional crafts through the acknowledgment of globalization and mobility. By addressing issues related to the impact of transnational flows in rural communities, this article argues for the contributions of migrants in their communities of destination and examines the transforming relationships between art, society, and local development.     

Becoming Transnational Through Assimilation: Emergence of National/Ethnic Identity Among Chinese Migrants in Late Nineteenth-Century Chicago

This paper explores the transnationalism seen among Chicago's Chinese migrants in tandem with their Americanization in the late 19th century. While migrants' transnationalism has several dimensions, the focus of this paper has been placed on their political practices, so-called "long-distance nationalism." Previous studies on migrants' transnationalism tended to assume marginalization in and a failure to assimilate into a host society as a reason for migrants' maintaining their ties to their countries of origin. A historical study of the migrants, however, showed another picture: transnationalism and assimilation processes could be reconciled. In order to explain how this is possible, this paper provides in the first part a background on the Chinese enclave in Chicago. Here the paper illustrates how seriously divided the Chinese community was over the difference of clan. The second part is divided into three sections and shows the process by which migrants became politically transnational. First, it deals with the emerging "Chinese" consciousness of migrants, elaborating on how such an inclusive awareness began to appear while they mobilized into a movement demanding naturalization and citizenship rights. In the course of such a movement, they promoted the Americanization of Chinese migrants. Second, how such processes, that is, the emergence of "Chinese" consciousness and assimilation proceeded at the same time is explained. Third, the paper shows how and when Chinese Chicagoans became politically involved in homeland politics. Throughout the paper, the idea of transnationalism is considered in relation to assimilation.     

Diaspora as socio-material assemblage: Political agency in the Kurdish freedom movement's representations of homeland

The proliferation of diasporas has expanded the intricate web of political relations on a global scale. Transnationality has increasingly replaced methodological nationalism, and relationality blurred diaspora's boundaries. This article argues for framing diasporas as socio-material assemblages to capture the political agency of diasporas in action in a transnational space. This highlights diasporas’ ability to forge their transnational political actorness and to expand their power of attractiveness. By tracing ideas and things behind the essential task of representing the homeland, this research explores the connections of the Kurdish freedom movement in Europe, making three main arguments. First, it outlines the existence of transnational infrastructures of solidarity, which highlight a multi-ethnic plurality at work. Second, it illuminates the diasporas’ role in the south–north flow of knowledge and political influence. Third, the article examines the desire which stabilizes the assemblage and makes the circulation of ideas possible and smooth.     

Interpreting Home in the Transnational Discourse

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to present a selection of primary findings culled from empirical data collected in Dublin with post-European Union enlargement Polish migrants as the cohort in study. One aspect of the project was to investigate how that group interpreted home since they have left Poland. Based on the outcomes of interviews with thirty-one informants, the narratives reveal a group of individuals who continuously contest social constraints and push the boundaries of previously held notions of migration, identity, and home. This article situates their aspirations, preferences, and practices within discourses of transnationalism, thereby connecting their migration experiences with a consciousness of feeling at home in the world. This article breaks up “home” as interpreted by the informants into three categories—centered home, sentimental home, and transportable home. The wide range of perspectives held by informants and the inability to clearly define their position with regard to the notion of “home” reinforces the hypothesis of this article that, for a transnational cohort, the meaning of home is contested. In relation to the wider international literature regarding concepts of home, this article makes a contribution to the deepening scope of migration research in Ireland.     

Three Forsaken Poets: Significant Absences in Balkan Modernism

ABSTRACT

Narratives dealing with the literary histories of South-Eastern Europe frame the canon of the nineteenth and twentieth century mostly in terms of rebirth, or re-awakening of a national culture. The literary history of Balkan modernisms and the avant-garde proves no exception to this rule. Its history has been often narrowed down to an often implicit monolingual canon with an ‘ethnic’ pedigree. This essay, although critical of these excluding mechanisms, does not propose a deconstruction of the national modernist canon. Instead, it wishes to reflect on alternative models for literary history, with alternative parameters that include figures of transition in terms of (national) language and ethnicity. It draws on three examples: Victor Tausk, Stanislav Vinaver and Monny de Boully.