The return of the Indian guide New formulations of the Indian guide at the end of the 20th century

Abstract

In the myth of the North American frontier defined as a place where two or more cultures interact, there is a set of characters who represent the capacity to move in both worlds and to build bridges between them. The translator is one and the 'guide' another. The figure of the 'Indian guide' – explored from white people's point of view ever since Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales – staged a large scale return at the end of the 20th century in North American (Canadian and American) novel and film, but now transformed by authors (generally Native American but not exclusively so) who view the history of the North American West from, as it were, the other side of the frontier line. This article will try to describe the new, rebellious, empowering characteristics of the Indian guide as represented in novels and films of the last 30 years.     

Writing of home and home of writing Chinese American diaspora and literary imagination

Abstract

The Silent Traveller's Hong Kong Zhuzhi Poems (1972) by Chiang Yee provides an interesting case for study in relation to Asian American literary theory aesthetics for at least the following three reasons: First, Chiang's poems comment on the 'idiosyncratic phenomena' in Hong Kong, and the ambiguity and sometimes contradictions in his comments allow us to explore the issues of assimilation and Americanization and to get a good understanding of the meaning of 'home' to a Chinese diasporic poet. Second, utilization of the zhuzhi form, a tradition that has been largely abandoned in modern China, suggests the intrinsic value of the cultural tradition and emotional or psychological satisfaction to a Chinese diaspora. Chiang's tenacious adherence to the cultural tradition is a reflection of his yearning for an imaginary 'home'. Third, the use of the Chinese language underlines the poet's Chinese cultural sensitivity. A discussion of the form, content, and language of these poems illustrates the complexity of Asian American cultural and ethnic identity and the significance of the imaginary 'home' – a construction through writing where a diaspora may find a haven in displacement.     

The Inter-ethnic Return: Racial and Cultural Multiplicity in Foundational Asian American and Chicana/o Literatures

Abstract

This article advocates that inter-ethnic contact and cross-cultural traffic condition the possibilities of imagining Asian American and Chicana/o identities, respectively, in early Asian American and Chicana/o novels. Using Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street as my primary examples, I demonstrate how early Asian American and Chicana/o literatures that have been critiqued almost exclusively within binary analytic paradigms articulate identity within a diverse field of racial and cultural differences. I argue that, in order to regard properly the inter-ethnic trends of recent US fiction and to liberate foundational minority texts from ethnic specific enclaves within US institutions, scholars need to recognize how negotiating a diverse spectrum of racial and cultural distinctions is a critical element of the early Asian American and Chicana/o literary imagination.     

White lies: Amelia E. Johnson's Sunday School fiction and the politics of racelessness

Abstract

This article reevaluates the cultural significance and literary complexity of the Sunday School novels published by Amelia E. Johnson during the 'Black Woman's Era'. The critical recovery of this lesser-known African American woman writer and editor focuses on her cultural activism and on the fictional strategies she deployed to challenge the limitations imposed by a white-dominated audience and publishing industry, as well as by the religious orthodoxy promoted by her denominational publishers. Problematizing the critical discourse that opposes her confrontational non-fiction writing to her racially indeterminate fiction, the article foregrounds Johnson's critique of gender, class and racial inequalities, her experimentation with narrative conventions, and her growing sense of disillusionment in the face of unrelenting discrimination, showing how Johnson's writing career illuminates the broader trends of African American women's literature at the turn into the 20th century.     

¿Qué hacen los nuevos americanistas? Collaborative strategies for a postnationalist American Studies

Abstract

This article advocates that the field of American Studies institutionalize Spanish as its second language in order both to address the cultural importance of the growing US Spanish-speaking population and to ensure productive scholarly dialogue within the context of the Americas. Its ideas follow up on recent proposals for 'new' or 'postnationalist' American Studies. It warns that Americanists must be conscious of unresolved issues raised in recent debates on Latin Americanism regarding the increasingly privileged status of English (vs. Spanish) language and US (vs. Latin America) based scholarship in the globalized field of Latin American Studies, problems sure to be exacerbated by a globalizing but US centered and monolingual American Studies. It concludes by suggesting a series of strategies to promote the incorporation of Spanish into both undergraduate and graduate level pedagogy, as well as to foment bilingual scholarly dialogue across the disciplines in the context of the Americas.     

'America' in transit The heresies of American studies abroad

Abstract

In arguing for the need to move beyond the export model and the global/local dialectic to internationalize American studies, this article explores the resiliency of the nation and nationalism to shape the transcontinental dynamics of the production, circulation, and consumption of 'America' as a commodity in a global market. In discussing the institutionalization of American studies in India, I argue that outside the boundaries of US American studies, we need to engage with the heretical practices of the globalization of American studies, which embody the translational yet conflictual itineraries of diverse interpretive communities across the world. Theorizing the relations among modernity, colonialism, and 'America', and re-imagining the emergence and significance of the many meanings and traditions of 'America' and American studies in transit along a global circuit are the central concerns of this article.     

The Literary Front of the Cold War: John Steinbeck as an Ideological Object in the Eastern Bloc

Abstract

The paper examines the ideological dimension of the reception of John Steinbeck in three post-communist countries, namely Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Slovenia. It discusses the prevalent mode of the writer's interpretation in the Eastern bloc which was governed by the political doctrines of the time. It is therefore often Steinbeck's politics, in the narrow sense of the word, that is scrutinized in the prefaces, afterwords, and reviews of his writings. The literary values are either marginalized or wholly ignored. Consequently, Steinbeck's criticism is determined by political correctness. It fails to consider the complexities of his work and treats the writer as an expedient object employed in the ideological campaign on the literary front.     

Reconstructing the Border: Jim Lynch and the Return of the Canada-US Boundary

Abstract

The western portion of the Canada-US border has always been problematic. Since it does not follow any 'natural' divide, such as a river, lake, or mountain range, it tends to be seen as an aberration, a political construct that lacks logic of its own. However, in his 2009 satire Border Songs, the Washington State novelist Jim Lynch reintroduces the Canada-US border as a marker of significant cultural and political difference. Even though he describes the international boundary as a 'nonsensical' line, Lynch suggests that people on the two sides of the border have remarkably different views of the world, notably when it comes to such issues as pot-growing and terrorism.     

Communicating Coffee Culture through the Big Screen: Starbucks in American Movies

Abstract

This paper examines Starbucks product placement in American movies. The portrait of Starbucks images in movies not only serves a promotional purpose, but also as a way of communicating coffee culture through the big screen. Content analysis and semiotic approaches are employed to examine the coffee culture that is communicated through American movies. Seven American movies from 1998 to 2008 which include Starbucks product placement are included in the content analysis while semiotic theories are applied to the 1998 movie You've Got Mail. The findings suggest that, through the movies, Starbucks attempts to establish the image of an upscale cosmopolitan coffee chain and a coffee culture that represents a vigorous American middle-class lifestyle.     

Figuring the future in Los(t) Angeles

Abstract

This article examines Los Angeles' symbolic relation to the rest of the US, deriving from its multi-layered political, social, economic, racialized and environmental complexity. Metropolitan Los Angeles has become 'a dystopian symbol of Dickensian inequalities and intractible racial contradictions', according to historian Mike Davis. Rather than representing America's modernity, Los Angeles has come to symbolize 'the collapse of the American Century'. Accordingly this article explores the motives of African American writers in representing Los Angeles as a politically and environmentally disastrous living space and a figure for the state of the nation. The value that black writers place upon and celebrate in the multiple range of urban ethnicities is at odds, not only with the class and racialized political and economic hierarchies of the city which oppresses its black residents but also contrary to contemporary dominant models of American citizenship. The article considers work by Chester Himes, Octavia Butler and Walter Mosley and argues that within and without the borders of the US, labels like 'minority' or 'ethnic' literature ghettoize, marginalize and minimize its significance. Yet the work of these authors currently carries the weight of the search for a more ethical and moral sense of responsibility for the state of a nation skidding down the path of increasing inhumanity, injustice and disregard, not only for the majority of its own population but for the majority of the residents of this planet. These works are significant acts of dissent from the perpetuation of injustice in contemporary politics, from the increasing extremes of wealth and poverty, and from the parasitic relation of the US to the environment.     

'Another History': Alternative Americas in Paul Auster's Fiction

Abstract

Even though Paul Auster's work has been influenced by European writers, he is also a fundamentally American writer. His settings, many of his literary references, his characters and most of his themes are certainly American. And so is his interest in American history and reality. Moon Palace (1989), for example, deals with the creation of the myth of the American Dream as the country extended its frontier westward. One of the ways for Auster to express his concerns is the creation of parallel fictions like 'Kepler's Blood', a story-within-the-story which fictionally rewrites the origins of the US. Almost two decades later, Travels in the Scriptorium (2006) creates another Western American fiction by moving forward and describing a parallel nineteenth-century North America and a country called 'the Confederation'. Finally, in Man in the Dark (2008), Auster's effort at the creation of alternative Americas reaches the twenty-first century by showing a country where the 2000 election has led to secession and war. This essay analyses the parallel worlds created by Auster to question American myths and archetypes, particularly as they relate to the origins of the myths behind the creation of the United States of America.     

Tarzan the German-Eater

Abstract

This article raises questions about methodology in the study of transnational popular writing by examining the international popularity of Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the Tarzan novels. Critical anti-imperialist analyses have found in Burroughs's fiction a dangerous metaphorics supporting imperialistic US foreign policies. In Weimar Germany, resistance to the Tarzan novels emerged that all but eliminated the market for these otherwise internationally popular fictions. Yet the German reaction shows how the idea of 'empire', embodied in tropes of race and gender, could continue to function in debates about international popular literature. At the same time, Burroughs was forced to adapt to international markets by tempering his imperialistic fictions. Burroughs's work after the controversy shows a shift in the depiction of national 'others', yet it had little radical potential because Burroughs had turned his imperial gaze inward, towards the internally colonized: Native Americans.     

Theorizing the hemisphere Inter-Americas work at the intersection of American,Canadian, and Latin American studies

Abstract

This article advocates an 'inter-Americas studies' perspective that bridges the institutionalized fields of American, Canadian, and Latin American studies, which have traditionally provided separate means for studying the hemisphere. Since they encompass comparative orientations, Canadian and Latin American studies in particular have the potential to move existing work on the hemisphere beyond the currently dominant post-national assumptions of American studies. Our discussion of Canadian and Latin American studies emphasizes the different usage and degree of importance ascribed to critical terms like ethnicity, post-coloniality, post-nationality, and globalization. We argue that inter-Americas studies scholars will need to pay special attention to historically divergent forms of nation-state formation and intellectual analyses of nationalism in the Americas to arrive at more nuanced theories of continuing US domination in the hemisphere under conditions of globalization.     

Post/past-'Orientalism' Orientalism and its dis/re-orientation

Abstract

In Orientalism (1978) Edward Said articulated more a cultural filter than a cultural divide, through a catalog of historical documents on the west's representation of the east, enabling readers to share a vocabulary that has now become a part of American intellectual history. In the last quarter century Orientalism has acquired a 'symbolic value' that was at best present as a 'potential value', thus realizing itself; from its initial position as an object of cultural study it has now become a subject imbued with the agency to change perception and understanding. It has problematized Orientalism itself and associated issues of the new globalism, such as immigration, diaspora, boundary crossings, cross-border terrorism, mixed ethnicities, international and inter-racial adoptions, and travel. The article focuses on the new social, political and economic faces of the old Orientalist attitudes, and calls for a radical revision of history.     

Enabling Fictions: Philip Roth's Prosthetic Anne Franks

Abstract

In this article, it is argued that insufficient attention has been paid to Philip Roth's uses of Anne Frank in his work. Concentrating on the 'Zuckerman' and 'Philip Roth' novels in which Anne Frank is discussed, it is illustrated that Anne Frank functions as a 'narrative prosthesis' not only in Roth's work and within American postwar culture, but that all representations of Anne Frank function as narrative prosthesis. The concept of Anne Frank as narrative prosthesis allows for recognition of the fact that Roth characterises writing and identity as prosthesis. Exploration of Roth's uses of Anne Frank also exposes problematics in his own work, particularly in his representations of women.     

The nightmares of the heteronormative

Abstract

Race and sexuality have always intersected in African‐American racial formation. In this article, I argue that this intersection has inspired certain epistemological, political, economic and cultural formations. In terms of epistemology, American sociology and African‐American literature have historically addressed the connections between race and sexuality. Both were interested in the ways that African‐American racial formation transgressed ideal heterosexual and patriarchal boundaries. As far as cultural formations were concerned, such transgressions materially and symbolically aligned African‐American racial formation with homosexuality. Attending to the political and economic effect of this alignment, I maintain that it helped to articulate African‐American racial difference and worked to exclude African‐Americans from the privileges of state and capital. Thus, the article argues that African‐American racial subordination can best be understood as it converges with heteronormative and patriarchal modes of regulation and exclusion. After showing how the most prominent sociology during the 1940s (Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma: The Negro and American Democracy) marked African‐Americans as pathologically heterosexual, I go on to read James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain to determine how the alignment between blackness and homosexuality suggests alternative and oppositional epistemological, cultural and political practices.     

US Americans and 'Us' Americans: South American perspectives on Comparative American Studies

Abstract

This article discusses topics in Comparative American Studies from a South American perspective. If, on the one hand, we no longer restrict a people's history or literary and cultural production to spaces which were arbitrarily constructed for political and economically hegemonic purposes, but rather see these 'national' spaces as plural and movable loci, on the other hand, the very concept of 'America' will require an approach that seeks to deal with the geographic, linguistic, ethnographic, cultural, political and economic hemispheric differences – and the relations between space and power that necessarily come to mind when one thinks about America comparatively. The us/them paradigm, in an inter-American context, becomes highly problematized: in historical terms, America, the New World, is primarily a European construct; later the word America was appropriated to signify the US national space. Thus, America must be approached from a perspective that takes into consideration these very processes; which is to say that, whichever the adopted approach, it will necessarily be one that problematizes 'American' and that develops a form of US Studies that theorizes an interpretive framework for studying how the US exports its image to the rest of the world, the many ways in which the rest of the world has constructed the US and how US Americans have imagined 'us' Americans.     

The Hobo Anomalous: Class,minorities and political invention in the Industrial Workers of the World

This article is an analysis of minority political invention in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Against the tendency in recent social and cultural theory to dichotomize class and difference, it argues that it was in and through the IWW's formulation of class that minority political and cultural invention occurred. Using the framework of Deleuze and Guattari's minor politics, the article shows how the IWW's composition in the simultaneously diffuse and cramped plane of work operated against the major political identities and subjects of worker, immigrant, American, citizen and 'people', and towards the creation of minority political knowledges, tactics and cultural styles premised on the condition that 'the people are missing'. Seeking to understand the IWW's modes and techniques of invention, the article explores the general plane of IWW composition, its particular political and cultural expressions (in songs, manifestos, cartoons and tactics), and its minor mode of authorship. The article focuses in particular on two aspects of IWW minority composition, the itinerant worker, or hobo, and the politics of sabotage.     

The black Atlantic,American studies and the politics of the postcolonial

Abstract

Twelve years of scholarship in the field of black-Atlantic-meets-American studies has resulted in a substantial body of knowledge around the extraterritorial excursions of US subjects and their cultural output. Despite the opportunities that the black Atlantic offered, it has begun to seem that the repositioning of academic perspective it stems from has itself become part of the discursive problems surrounding US American studies. This article suggests that it is time to rethink (black) Atlantic studies in the context of its partial institutionalization within the academy. First, it revisits the methodological and theoretical possibilities the field offered. Second, it examines some of the shortcomings which, in the early stages of the project, it was possible to overlook if not entirely ignore. Third, it looks at developments in the field of postcolonial studies, suggesting some conceptual tensions of relevance to postcolonial, US American, and American studies more generally.