Re-covered: Wangechi Mutu,Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle,and the postcolonial potentiality of black women in colonial(ist) photographs

By pasting on, cutting into and drawing over images of bodies, artists Wangechi Mutu and Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle re-cover colonialist photographs to recover postcolonial black female subjectivities. In her project, The Uninvited, ongoing since 2009, Hinkle has literally and conceptually drawn upon colonial-era postcards that feature photographs of nude West African girls and women, while Mutu has strategically combined images of black African and black American women from ethnographic and pornographic magazines to create her Ark Collection (2006). In the artists’ hands, the black female body is no longer shot, captured, framed or otherwise subjected to the camera. The narrative force and assumed veracity of photography is denied by ambiguous re-presentations of the multifaceted, processual nature of both art and the self. Moreover, rather than merely suggest the subjugation and fragmentation of black women, the works represent the postcolonial potentiality of transformation and agency.     

For a postcolonial sociology

Postcolonial theory has enjoyed wide influence in the humanities but it has left sociology comparatively unscathed. Does this mean that postcolonial theory is not relevant to sociology? Focusing upon social theory and historical sociology in particular, this article considers if and how postcolonial theory in the humanities might be imported into North American sociology. It argues that postcolonial theory offers a substantial critique of sociology because it alerts us to sociology’s tendency to analytically bifurcate social relations. The article also suggests that a postcolonial sociology can overcome these problems by incorporating relational social theories to give new accounts of modernity. Rather than simply studying non-Western postcolonial societies or only examining colonialism, this approach insists upon the interactional constitution of social units, processes, and practices across space. To illustrate, the article draws upon relational theories (actor-network theory and field theory) to offer postcolonial accounts of two conventional research areas in historical sociology: the industrial revolution in England and the French Revolution.     

Working with Leroy

Abstract

With the recent transnational turn in the humanities and social sciences, questions of translocalism have come to dominate the academic agenda. Where southern African studies has engaged with transnationalism, this has generally been pursued through the framework of the black Atlantic. This article argues that we need to supplement this perspective with a systematic engagement with the Indian Ocean. The article outlines various major historiographical traditions associated with the Indian Ocean and then seeks to draw out how these themes challenge assumptions which have been theorised on the basis of black Atlantic patterns. The paper concludes with a discussion of how a consideration of the Indian Ocean would enlarge the maps of South African literary and cultural studies.     

Pulping the Black Atlantic: Chester Himes’ A Case of Rape and the Limits of Expatriation

Abstract

This article examines the early expatriate career of Chester Himes, and his overlooked Paris-set novella A Case of Rape (1956). Scholars have identified postwar Paris as the locus of a ‘Black Atlantic’ cosmopolitanism that allowed African American writers to transcend American racial and literary regimes, and in particular the stigma of black ‘protest’ fiction. By contrast, this article argues that Himes’ exile was paradoxical; defined by an exchange, rather than an ‘exceeding’ of American racial and literary stigmas. First, I explore the fetishistic racial politics that energized the Left Bank’s construction of black expatriates as symbols of individualist, masculine, and specifically western transgression. Second, I examine the way in which A Case of Rape, and its narrative of the false conviction of four African American expatriates for rape, dramatizes this paradox. With supreme irony, the novella sees the expatriate celebrity merge with a central symbol of the African American ‘protest’ novel: the black male rapist of white women. Finally, I argue that A Case of Rape is of particular importance for the ways in which it anticipates Himes’ move into pulp fiction. Like his later detective series, A Case of Rape captures Himes’ own disillusionment with conventional notions of authorial autonomy, and literary instrumentality. I conclude that expatriation worked to galvanize, rather than displace, Himes’ interest in the overdetermination of African American literature within dominant western racial discourses.     

American Studies in East Asia

Abstract

American Studies as practised in China, Japan, and Korea has some features of its own and reflects the specific conditions and needs of each country. Chinese Americanists have shown keen interest in US economy, politics, and China policy. Japanese Americanists are interested in ethnic studies and contemporary international issues involving the USA, while Korean Americanists are attracted to ethnic writers and politicians. Unlike their colleagues elsewhere, some East Asian Americanists have tended to study the USA in order to find the source of American strength through social sciences more than the American national ethos reflected in American culture, literature, and history.     

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.     

Distance between you and your home: the estrangement of postcolonial writing

This essay argues that the writing of postcolonial migrant authors has been critically deployed in such a way that it appears to vindicate a long standing romantic ideology of artistic detachment. In order to present an alternative account, the field of Nigerian anglophone fiction is examined here and the experiences of two aspiring authors offered as case‐studies. It is argued that their experience, and the wider circumstances of Nigerian cultural production, demonstrate that postcolonial migrant writing is not an expression of ‘aesthetic alienation’, but of the estrangement that Marx recognised as a subjective consequence of capitalism.     

'Hirelings in the Camp,the Court & the University': some figurations of US English departments,area studies and Masao Miyoshi as Blakean poet Written for the 'Imminent Questions' Conference at NYU, 29 April–1 May 2004

Abstract

This article concerns figuring forth and dismantling the poesis of area studies in the era of transnational capital and what Jack Spicer called 'the English Department of the Spirit'. I will build out from some poems, anecdotes and historical memories as well as play upon Kenzaburo Oe's figurations of Blake as visionary poet of geopolitical transformation and a revolutionary will to liberationist energies to connect the work Masao Miyoshi has done and prodded into trans/disciplinary and transnational coalition since the 1970s. I will figure forth Masao Miyoshi as a Blakean poet working to energize the refiguration and dismantling of the whole US field-imaginary of Japanese and Asian, as well as British and American area studies, which was our shared starting point in the dialectics of post-1968 history as teacher/student on the left-coast trans-Pacific US front.     

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.     

The transnational turn,Houston Baker's new southern studies and Patrick Neate's Twelve Bar Blues

Abstract

This article considers Houston Baker's take on the 'new southern studies' in Turning South Again (2001) in relation to the transnational turn in American studies and Paul Gilroy's theory of the 'Black Atlantic'. The article begins by pointing out that the vision of 'the South' formulated in southern (literary) studies during and after the 1950s frequently cut against the nationalism and exceptionalism central to the development of American studies in the same period. However, southern literary critics and writers (both white and black) developed their own exceptionalist and nativist models of identity, including Donald Davidson's 'autochthonous ideal' and the 'Quentissential fallacy' – in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Quentin Compson's claim that 'you would have to be born' in the South to understand it. A transnational turn displaces such southern exceptionalism and nativism. However, Baker's 'new southern studies' approach to African-American experience (from slavery to 'United States black modernism') proceeds through a predominantly regional-national framework and privileges 'the South' and his own native southern authority. From a transnational perspective, Baker's approach becomes problematic when it facilitates the 'Quentissential' repudiation of Gilroy's Black Atlantic. The article concludes by discussing the transnational South of Patrick Neate's novel, Twelve Bar Blues, with reference to Gilroy and songs by Billie Holiday and Eric B and Rakim.     

Agricultural food resources and the foraging ecologies of American black ducks (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Anas rubripes</Emphasis>) and mallards (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Anas platyrhynchos</Emphasis>) at the northern limits of their winter ranges

Atlantic Canada is the northern limit of the American black duck (Anas rubripes) wintering range, and more recently, the mallard (A. platyrhynchos) wintering range. Atlantic Canada has experienced considerable urban and agricultural development over the last century, and wintering black ducks and mallards appear to be using these habitats, in addition to traditional coastal habitat to survive the winters. This paper combines digestive tract content and stable isotope analysis to provide a comprehensive analysis of winter black duck and mallard diet in Atlantic Canada, and compares mallard and black duck winter diet in agricultural and coastal areas. Coastal black ducks wintering in Atlantic Canada had a diet consisting mainly of marine invertebrates and wild plant matter, while coastal mallards appeared to rely less on invertebrates and more on plant matter through winter. As winter progressed, the agricultural black ducks relied more on the feed provided by the farmer at our study site, indicated by a significant decline in their δ¹⁵N ratios. Mallards at the agricultural site maintained a low and steady δ¹⁵N ratio through winter, indicating a less diverse winter diet than sympatrically-wintering black ducks. Urban black ducks had a diet consisting entirely of vegetation and anthropogenic food supplies, which appeared to meet their nutritional requirements for winter survival. Our research highlights the importance of agricultural and urban habitats for wintering black ducks and mallards in Atlantic Canada.     

Defending America against its devotees Presidential Address,First World Congress of the International American Studies Association,Leiden, The Netherlands, 22–4 May 2003

Abstract

This presidential address at the International American Studies Association's first world congress was composed while the invasion of Iraq was under way. Like the Vietnam War that was launched through an historic act of mendacity called the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the current pre-emptive war may be based on claims and ideological agendas equally suspect in their veracity that may well prove a watershed for American culture and paradigm-altering for American Studies. This first IASA presidential address traces the historical precedents of the National Defense Strategy of the United States of America of September 2002, since called the Bush Doctrine, and reads it as a Monroe Doctrine writ globally and as a new US Martial Plan that displaces the Marshall Plan on which the current American Studies field was founded. The portentous changes implicit in this displacement bode a transformation in the foundation of American Studies similar to the changes precipitated by the Vietnam War, with the difference that the global scope of American Studies as an international field today will resist the re-absorption of these changes into a national and nationalist project of US Americanism.     

American-British Sporting Rivalries and the Making of the Global Sports Industry

Abstract

This article examines a key aspect of American sports history within a transnational context. Whilst the internal histories of American sport are exceedingly rich and voluminous, our general understanding of the nation’s contribution to the international, global scene is less well-known. The postcolonial rivalries between American and British sports communities fuelled the development of what became open, international cup competitions in such sports as tennis and golf which bolstered an emerging global industry in the first half of the twentieth century. The transnational process of initial American imitation and absorption of British models have been well documented within the scholarly literature and debates in American Studies for decades; however, the gradual reversal of this imitative process to a more reciprocal relationship has received far less attention (especially within sports history). The authors show how the Davis Cup competition is an example of the way in which Americans indigenised a cultural sporting import, namely tennis; created a nationalistic, international sporting competition; and effectively exported it back to Britain within the wider context of a burgeoning, imperial rivalry on the world stage between these two, rival sporting nations. This process not only expanded the worldwide consumption of sport but spreads a spirit of cultural emulation within twentieth-century global consumer culture. This transnational perspective also illuminates the thorough de-provincialising of the notion of “American Exceptionalism” within the field. When, for example, the respective imperial histories of the two nations are considered comparatively, the “American” story does not look so “exceptional” after all. Though American exceptionalism adapted some British sports to suit American sensibilities, the sporting cultures of the two nations and within their zones of influence remained similar in many respects. This was particularly true in amateur sports such as tennis, rowing and track and field (athletics to the Brits) as well as in the sport of golf. In the twentieth century, many sports adapted as focus shifted from nationalism and national worth towards professionalism and international spectacle.     

Epistemologies of Peace: Poetics,Globalization, and the Social Justice Movement

Abstract

Poetics, as an epistemological approach, articulates alternative imaginaries to those proffered by the neoliberal world order. With a long history of drawing upon various sites to further its aims (e.g. the academy, the international studies association, political parties, the state), the neoliberal world order has used its epistemologies to constitute a hegemony emphasizing the state as the primary actor of political life. Feminists and scholars in postcolonial IR, black studies, and ethnic studies have challenged this idea, arguing that there are differential epistemological economies in world politics. Larger questions at stake in these different sites/cites include self and collective knowledge of marginal peoples and the envisioning of alternative, oppositional histories of decolonization, struggle and contestation. Traditional disciplinary boundaries become sites/cites of contestation about the forging and making of alternatives as academics, grassroots organizers, and activists, through poetics, work together to creatively engage questions of economies, power, history, and subject-formations.     

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.     

Examining Racial Differences in the Effects of Substance Abuse on High School Students' Academic Achievement

Abstract

Many studies document racial disparities in the American educational system, finding that white students generally outperform black students. Researchers justifiably focus on structural explanations for such disparities, but generally pay less attention to more proximate influences on academic achievement. However, studies have found that substance use negatively impacts adolescent academic achievement; other findings on race and substance use suggest that this relationship could be more damaging for black students. This paper uses National Education Longitudinal Study data to determine if substance use negatively impacts the academic achievement of high school students, and if black students are more negatively affected than whites. The analysis finds that substance use has a negative impact on academic achievement, even while controlling for a range of known influences on academic achievement. However, this relationship is not found to be more damaging to black students, probably due to white students' higher level of substance use.     

¿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.     

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.     

‘Ways of Remembering’: Transatlantic Connections and African Diaspora's Homecoming in the Republic of Benin

Abstract

Since the seventeenth century, the Atlantic ‘perimeter’ has been characterised by exchanges of commodities, bodies and cultural productions. Within this space, West Africa has established itself as an ‘ancestral land’: a pivotal physical and imagined location for its diaspora. Exploring how a ‘homeland’ is constructed, the article analyses practices of homecoming in the contemporary Republic of Benin. It argues that the particular historical conjuncture of the early 1990s, mainly characterised by the democratic transition, has allowed the restoration of Atlantic connections. Aspiring to establish a vibrant tourism industry, the new government strongly encouraged African American homecomings, commemorating the slave trade and celebrating diasporic cultures. The Vodun religion, because of its propagation across the New World through the slave trade, became the core symbol of this reunion, the very evidence of the strength of ancestral linkages and a foundation for black commonality. Reframing notions of ancestry and transnational belongings, the article examines how the insertion of Benin into global, economic and cultural circuits has led to the emergence of new cultural practices, meanings and subjectivities, both related to national and diasporic spaces.