1956 | ||
quarterly | ||
English, German | ||
literature, cultural studies, history, political science, linguistics, critical theory, teaching of American Studies |
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0340-2827 | ||
Winter | ||
Amerikastudien / American Studies
Amerikastudien / American Studies is the journal of the German Association for American Studies. It started as the annual Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien in 1956 and has since developed into a quarterly with some 1200 subscriptions in Europe and the United States. The journal is dedicated to interdisciplinary and transnational perspectives and embraces the diversity and dynamics of a dialogic and comparatist understanding of American Studies. It covers all areas of American Studies from literary and cultural criticism, history, political science, and linguistics to the teaching of American Studies. Special-topics issues alternate with regular ones. Reviews, forums, and annual bibliographies support the international circulation of German and European scholarship in American Studies. |
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2011, Vol. 56, No. 2
Mission Statement
Abolitionists from the Other Shore: Radical German Immigrants and the Transnational Struggle to End American Slavery
The 1850s in the United States are commonly remembered as a time of fierce controversy over the westward expansion of slavery; yet they were also a period of mass immigration. Simultaneous to the escalating sectional conflict, emigration from Europe soared to record numbers, further exacerbating debates over race, nationality, and citizenship in the young republic. In a climate of increased worries about the nation's future, the arrival of German-speaking Forty-Eighters, refugees of the failed European Revolutions of 1848/49, fueled existing apprehensions among the older settlers. The following article offers a fresh appraisal of these exiled democrats during the run-up to the Civil War and beyond by probing their relationship to another group of beleaguered agitators, America's abolitionists. It outlines how individuals from both camps joined forces in the long, often dangerous battle to eliminate slavery and argues that cooperation shaped the activists' social and political identities in a society steeped in racist and nativist thought. Adding the experience of radical German immigrants to the abolitionist struggle, it elucidates how immigration affected American conversations over slavery, race, and emancipation. Most significantly, the article gauges the extent to which the alliance between Forty-Eighters and abolitionists challenged prevailing concepts of freedom and equality in a transatlantic age of racial construction and nation-making.
Singing Hail Columbia in German and English: Carl Schurz's Sequential Bilingualism
This article focuses on the bicultural and bilingual legacy of the German-born Senator, diplomat, Civil War General, and man of letters Carl Schurz (1829-1906). Particular attention is devoted to Schurz's autobiography, the first part of which, dealing with his youth in Germany up to the 1848 revolution and his exile, was written in his mother tongue, while the second part about his American career was composed in English. The aim of the article is to draw renewed attention to the bilingual dimension of Schurz's Lebenserinnerungen - Reminiscences in order to rethink accepted notions on migration and assimilation. I argue that while on a surface level, through its narration of Schurz's impressive rise to fame as an American orator and writer, the memoir bespeaks an integrationist perspective on immigration, this interpretation is in need of revision if we take into consideration the divergences between the German and English versions of the book.
Lap Dancing for Mommy: Queer Intermediality, Chick Lit, and Trans-Generational Feminist Mediation in Erika Lopez's Illustrated Narratives
Erika Lopez has been active as a performance artist, writer, and graphic novelist since the 1990s. Lopez's work is emblematic of a transition from second-wave feminism and identity-based lesbian activism to a third-wave, queer approach to gender, sexual, and other difference categories, using humor and a creative politics of the in-between which disturbs generational, sexual, gendered, and ethnic binarisms alike. This essay examines how, through the use of intermedial spaces and gaps, such work accomplishes a mediation between two generations of feminists that are often set in opposition in contemporary debates, and argues for the importance of a verbal and visual bridging of the feminist generation gap. Texts like Lopez's, this article argues, critically negotiate a collective feminist memory, acknowledging difference but not division.
Pragmatismus und die Hoffnung auf Solidarität
Durkheim's and Horkheimer's critiques of pragmatism have often been portrayed as misunderstandings. However, a pragmatist perspective contradicts itself if it claims that its opponents missed the 'true meaning of a text.' Reorienting the discussion towards ideas of truth is equally uninteresting for the pragmatist. The present paper wishes to frame the discussion around the concept of hope instead. For this purpose, the critiques of pragmatism are seen as 'foundationalist theory hope' and 'anti-foundationalist theory hope.' The paper offers a pragmatic concern with hope as a rebuttal.
Other Issues
Boasian Aesthetics: American Poetry, Visual Culture, and Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 63, No. 4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2018, Vol. 63, No. 3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2018: Digital Scholarship in American Studies, Vol. 63, No. 2
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2018, Vol. 63, No. 1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2017: Marx and the United States, Vol. 62, No. 4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2017, Vol. 62, No. 3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2017: Poetry and Law, Vol. 62, No. 2
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2017, Vol. 62, No. 1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2016: Environmental Imaginaries on the Move: Nature and Mobility in American Literature and Culture, Vol. 61, No.4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2016, Vol. 61, No.3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2016: Turkish-American Literature, Vol. 61, No.2
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2016, Vol. 61, No.1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2015: Risk, Security: Approaches to Uncertainty in American Literature, Vol. 60, No. 4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2015, Double Issue, Vol. 60, No. 2/3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2015: Network Theory and American Studies, Vol. 60, No.1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2014: South Africa and the United States in Transnational American Studies, Vol. 59, No. 4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2014, Vol. 59, No. 3,
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2014, Vol. 59, No. 2
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2014, Vol. 59, No. 1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2013: Iconographies of the Calamitous in American Visual Culture, Vol. 58, No. 4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2013, Vol. 58, No. 3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2013: Pragmatism's Promise, Vol. 58, No. 2
Amerika Studien / American Studies 2013, Vol. 58, No. 1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2012: Tocqueville's Legacy: Towards a Cultural History of Recognition in American Studies , Vol. 57, No.4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2012, 57.3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2012 - Conceptions of Collectivity in Contemporary American Literature, Vol. 57, No. 2
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2012, Vol. 57, Vol. 1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2011: American Comic Books and Graphic Novels, Vol. 56, No. 4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2011, Vol. 56, No. 3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2011, Vol. 56, No. 1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2010: African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges
, Vol. 55, No. 4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2010: Trauma's Continuum -- September 11th Reconsidered, Vol. 55, No. 3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2010, Vol. 55, No. 2
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2010: Poverty and the Culturalization of Class , Vol. 55, No. 1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2009, Vol. 54, No. 4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2009: American History/ies in Germany: Assessments, Transformations, Perspectives, Vol. 54, No. 3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2009, Vol. 54, No. 2
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2009: Appropriating Vision(s): Visual Practices in American Women's Writing, Vol. 54, No. 1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2008, Vol. 53, No. 4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2008: Die Bush-Administration: Eine erste Bilanz, Vol. 53, No. 3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2008, Vol. 53, No. 2
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2008: Inter-American Studies and Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 53, No. 1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2007, Vol. 52, No. 4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2007 - Teaching American Studies in the Twenty-First Century, Vol. 52, No. 3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2007, Vol. 52, No. 2
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2007 - Transatlantic Perspectives on American Visual Culture, Vol. 52, No. 1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2006, Vol. 51, No. 4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2006 - Asian American Studies in Europe, Vol. 51, No. 3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2006, Vol. 51, No. 2
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2006 - Multilingualism and American Studies
, Vol. 51, No. 1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2005, Vol. 50, No. 4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2005 - Early American Visual Culture, Vol. 50, No. 3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2005 - American Studies at 50, Vol. 50, Nos. 1/2