Shifting Paradigms: American Literature in India

The thrust of this essay is threefold. In the first place, it speaks of the advent of American Studies (including American Literature) in India. Secondly, it traces the changing graph of American Literature in Indian universities. Finally, it attempts to explain the shifting paradigms in this field, looking at the road ahead. Investigating these major issues, the essay tackles related matters pertaining to pedagogy, mainstream ideology, and canon-formation. The views expressed are rooted mainly in the author’s personal experience, based on almost four decades of active involvement in American Literature, and an awareness of the fluctuating graph of the discipline in India and the manner in which the discipline is taught in universities within and outside India. Here the attempt is not to isolate “American Literature” as a water-tight category but to see it as a growing, evolving, permeable system shot through by different beliefs, ideologies, and other literatures of the world.     

Contemporary Research on Social Movements and Protest in Latin America: Promoting Democracy, Resisting Neoliberalism, and Many Themes in between

This essay outlines how research on Latin American social movements has evolved since the late 1980s. Emphasis is given to two topics. First, the essay examines how Latin American social movement research has historically been oriented toward social movement theories that emerged out of the study of European movements and, to a lesser extent, movements in the United States. At the same time, it discusses how the unique historical and contextual factors of Latin American societies have repeatedly been found to defy adequate explanation by these theories. Second, the essay outlines five major themes that characterize the Latin American social movement literature: the dynamics of movements in relation to transitions to democracy, and to neo-liberal economic reforms, as well as transnational movement dynamics, indigenous movements, and women's movements.     

Redefining the American Revolutionary: Gabriela Mistral on José Martí

Abstract

This essay criticizes the historical investment of Martí's readers in a discourse that values conservative, sexually unambiguous femininity and masculinity. The essay grapples with the vituperative register of José Martí's misogyny in order to reveal another version of the American revolutionary. Drawing on one of his earliest feminist critics, Gabriela Mistral, I show how corporeal tropes in Martí's rhetoric betray instances of empathy with emerging alternative practices of femininity and masculinity. Assisted by Mistral's overlooked and overtly gendered critique, this essay limns a tropical Martí — an embodied, sensual, demonumentalized poet who plays with language. In readings of Mistral's several essays devoted to Martí, the essay shows how Mistral's Martí represents an alternative to the heroic masculinism and violent militarism of a longstanding revolutionary American tradition.     

Hollywood piracy in China: An accidental case of US public diplomacy in the globalization age?

Challenging existing approaches and assumptions, this essay identifies the phenomenon of Hollywood piracy in China as an agent of American expansion in the region, amplifying the distribution of US popular culture artifacts. This accidental, yet relevant public diplomacy occurrence thrives outside the control of central governments, driven by transnational profit oriented entities, both legal (Hollywood studios producing and distributing entertainment content) and illegal (counterfeiters amplifying uncensored distribution through piracy). Drawing parallels with US public diplomacy efforts beyond the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, the essay suggests that a similar transformation is occurring through this illegal practice in the digital global media landscape of the twenty-first century. In fact, the diffusion of Hollywood content in China, legally and illegally, increases the diffusion of the American influence in the region through the diffusion of its language, music, and material culture embedded in Hollywood's entertainment artifacts.     

What does it mean to be a ‘European’?

The paper explores the notion of Europeanism, asking the question: what does it mean to be a European? In much the same terms as in Michael Walzer's often-cited essay ‘What does it mean to be an American?’, Walzer's analysis will serve as a point of departure for a discussion of different conceptions of European self-understanding. Some points of contrast will be made between American hyphenated identities and European identity, conceived of in terms of a notion of cosmopolitanism.     

Education after Abu Ghraib

Drawing upon Theodor Adorno's famous essay, ‘Education After Auschwitz, ‘this article examines the question of how education should be engaged in light of the abuse and torture by American soldiers and personnel that took place at Abu Ghraib prison. The essay attempts to understand not only how the photographs of abuse and torture signalled a particular form of public pedagogy, but also how pedagogy itself becomes central to understanding the changing political, ideological, and economic conditions that made the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib possible and what the latter implies for how we understand both cultural politics and the growing authoritarian nature of American society.     

A Changing Game: Ethnicity,Gender, and Nation in the US American Soccer Film

Both sport and film play a key role in contemporary US American popular culture. They are widely regarded as legitimate carriers and formative instances of social identities such as ethnicity, gender, or nationality, and they have capitalized upon one another with increasing success. Soccer and soccer films provide a case in point, as both the sport and its treatment in US American feature films are currently undergoing a change from a rather marginal position to a somewhat secure place within the cultural mainstream. This essay analyses five recent American soccer films with a particular focus on how they frame soccer as an ethnic, gendered, and ‘national’ game in a US context.     

Amnesia: Cultural Memory,Reconciliation, and Communal Accountability in the Americas

Contributing to debates on the status of comparison in transnational American studies, this essay offers a morphologically comparative approach to memory’s cultural politics in conflict resolution, juxtaposing two histo-ries — one ‘geo-political’ (nation-state, transatlantic) and the other ‘micro-history’ (small-town, regional) — whose ensuing negotiations unsettle paradigms of silencing and forgetting, especially as these pertain to ‘reconciliation’. Offering an alternative to predominantly psychoanalytic treatments of cultural memory and power, this essay employs morphological analysis and queer theory to explore cultural amnesia through blending ethnographic and media sources on the politics of it in the assignment of accountability and belonging.     

美国在中东的民主困境——试析美国的大中东计划

自小布什总统上台以来，促进民主已经成为美国中东政策的核心支柱之一。布什总统的大中东民主计划是美国民主化战略的重要一环，本文将对该计划与克林顿政府和欧洲的民主计划作简要比较，在此基础上对其未来的发展作初步评估。     

A Stylistic Analysis of Hillary Clinton's Concession Speech

Public speech is an art. It presents the features of formal written language while exhibiting characteristics of the spoken. Hillary Clinton(born October 26, 1947), as an influential women politician in American politics, addressed her speech on NOV 9, 2016. This speech is considered a strength. This paper will analysis the speech from functional stylistic, which is attempted to analyze how English speeches are constrained from the angle of metafunction and context of situation. Via the essay, we can have a better understanding of the public speech.     

Transcending Borders,Bridging Gaps: Opening a Dialogue Between the U. S. A. and Italy’s Migration Turn

ABSTRACT

This essay discusses recent theoretical engagements in the fields of migration and postcolonial studies in Italy by examining their contribution to American and transatlantic studies. It focuses on cultural critiques and manifestations which seek an interrogation or revitalization of Italy’s cultural identity. The analysis draws on the many links between past and present, a confrontation of the histories of migration from and to the country. For instance, the Italian/American influence is remarkable on transforming views of Italian identity, particularly regarding (im)migration. The objective of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it examines how artistic productions compel the Italian society to come to terms with the past. This phenomenon attests to a unique social and cultural transition in Italy, and represents a breeding research ground within Italian studies and the Anglo-dominated area of postcolonial and diaspora studies. On the other hand, the essay investigates how these changes enhance to the role of transatlantic migrations. In doing so, the significance of such cultural productions is framed within ongoing epistemological and scholarly endeavours. This is exemplified by the abundant number of publications, seminars, conferences and new curricula challenging, as well as advancing, contemporary debates on migration, multiculturalism, identity (Italian-ness) and memory.     

Chinks in the Merged Attachment: Generational Bequests to Contemporary Teenage Girls

This essay reviews Picturing the Modern Amazon, an exhibit of the representations of hypermuscular women presented at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City from March 30 to June 25, 2000. Taking a sociohistorical approach, the essay situates the museum exhibit in the context of the development of American bodybuilding. The images of the Modern Amazons are linked to the intensification of capitalism and the subsequent growth of the bodybuilding, health, and fitness industries. From this perspective, we see that the Modern Amazons face a cultural paradox, for they are both gender-bending figures of muscular excess and a mainstream form of mass production; thus, they simultaneously overturn and recuperate gender norms. This essay explores the ways in which the exhibit itself embodies contradictions. In its attempt to celebrate the subversive aspects of hyper muscular females, the show decontexualizes the Modern Amazons, removing them from their muscle-building spaces and processes and rendering them into visual commodities.     

WHO WE ARE:

This article conveys the Iranian experience in the United States by analyzing the formation of an Iranian identity in the United States. The author characterizes this dual identity and interprets the Iranian-American culture. The essay also focuses on the relationship between American civil society and its immigrants.     

Playing in the White Man's Yard Reflections on Jane Flax's The American Dream in Black and White—The Clarence Thomas Hearings

This essay engages Jane Flax's The American Dream in Black and White: The Clarence Thomas Hearings through an elaboration of both the manifest and latent beliefs that mine the actions of a promising man of color, and a powerful group of men who sit in judgment of him. Noting the role assumed by gender politics in this drama, the author highlights Max's lucid commentary on the progress of the American dream, as women and people of color still serve as dispensable commodities for the men of the mainstream.     

Police and Lethal Force: A Response to Hirschfield

This essay serves as a response to Hirschfield's (2015) article, “Lethal Policing: Making Sense of American Exceptionalism,” published in the December 2015 issue of this journal.     

The Forum Mailbox

This essay serves as a response to Hirschfield's (2015) article, “Lethal Policing: Making Sense of American Exceptionalism,” published in the December 2015 issue of this journal.     

Minimizing the Roots of a Racialized Social System: Ignoring Gender—Lethal Policing and Why We Must Talk More,Not Less,About Race and Gender

This essay serves as a response to Hirschfield's (2015) article, “Lethal Policing: Making Sense of American Exceptionalism,” published in the December 2015 issue of this journal.     

Identifying the Drivers of the Exceptionally High Rates of Lethal and Racially Biased Violence by Police in the United States Requires Geographically Resolved Data and Analysis

This essay serves as a response to Hirschfield's (2015) article, “Lethal Policing: Making Sense of American Exceptionalism,” published in the December 2015 issue of this journal.     

RELOCATING AMERICAN FILM HISTORY

This essay argues that one of the legacies of ‘grand theory’ in film studies is an ambivalence toward the spatial and social conditions of the cinematic experience. This suspicion of the empirical has also conditioned scholarship on the history of movie audiences and reception. The history of moviegoing in the American South underscores the importance of space, place, and sociality as constitutive features of the experience of cinema.