		1956
		quarterly
		English, German

		literature, cultural studies, history, political science, linguistics, critical theory, teaching of American Studies

		0340-2827

		Winter


General Editors: Carmen Birkle Birgit Däwes Review Editor: Anke Ortlepp Editorial Board: Christa Buschendorf Ingrid Gessner Anke Ortlepp Heike Paul Marc Priewe Boris Vormann Associate Editors: Cedric Essi Johanna Heil Kathleen Loock Connor Pitetti

For our full submission guidelines, please visit https://dgfa.de/american-studies-a-quarterly-2/submitting/ For manuscripts and books for review, please contact our review editors at reviews@dgfa.de. There is no obligation to review unsolicited books. Amerikastudien / American Studies E-Mail: amst@dgfa.de In view of the computerized production of the journal, manuscripts of articles and reviews can only be accepted if submitted as computer files (preferably MS Word) and accompanied by a printout. Please note the following formal requirements: – Article manuscripts - manuscript text, abstract, notes, list of works cited - should not exceed 60,000 to 70,000 characters (including spaces). – All articles must be preceded by an abstract in English of no more than 200 words. – Since Amerikastudien / American Studies follows a double blind-peer review system, articles should contain no references to the author. – An Amerikastudien / American Studies style sheet is available under https://dgfa.de/american-studies-a-quarterly-2/article-style-sheet/ The editorial team gladly provides a MS Word document template file (DOT) that is used for pre-typesetting (preflighting).

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.
(https://amst.winter-verlag.de/)
Editors: Carmen Birkle and Birgit Däwes
Review Editor: Anke Ortlepp
Address: Amerikastudien/American Studies
Prof. Dr. Carmen Birkle
Philipps-Universität Marburg
FB 10 Department of English and American Studies
Wilhelm-Röpke-Str. 6f
35032 Marburg, Germany
Phone: +49 6421-2824-345
E-Mail: amst@dgfa.de
or
Prof. Dr. Birgit Däwes
Europa-Universität Flensburg
Department of English and American Studies
Auf dem Campus 1
24943 Flensburg, Germany
E-Mail: amst@dgfa.de

» Visit Journal Web Site

Amerikastudien / American Studies 2011, Vol. 56, No. 3

Die Lincoln Rezeption in Deutschland

By Horst Dippel
The stereotype of Abraham Lincoln as the ideal statesman has appealed not only to Americans, but to Germans and many others whose nations have experienced the violence of long-lasting and bloody war. German appreciation of Lincoln is particularly reflected in the various intellectual currents that span the ups and downs of modern German history. Consistent with the different stages of this history, Lincoln's noble resolution to save the Union can be seen in German political themes such as national unity, democracy, and reconciliation. Beside these notions, which were conditioned by the spirit of the respective epoch, an appreciation of a more timeless character prevails in the admiration of Lincoln's humanity, balancing his role as President and commander-in-chief. This article examines one hundred fifty years of German comments on Lincoln. It analyzes features that remain common over time as well as those that express the spirit of the historical era in which they were written, in particular the decades from 1865 through 1918, the Weimar Republic and the Nazi years, and the more recent period since 1945.

Forging Music into Ideology: Charles Seeger and the Politics of Cultural Pluralism in American Domestic and Foreign Policy

By Andrea Franzius
This article analyzes the ways in which a group of American leftwing composers and intellectuals, most notably Charles Seeger and Henry Cowell, as well as anthropologist Melville Herskovits, turned music into a political and policy tool during the New Deal years and World War II, thereby helping to create the cultural, intellectual, and institutional foundations for the cultural Cold War. It explores how under diverse national and international cultural influences the composers tried to find a new national idiom, and finally explored notions of cultural pluralism tied to humanist universalism as a bond between America's different population groups. When the war shifted the focus toward countering what the government perceived as a threatening German and Italian cultural infiltration of its Latin American neighbors, the composers were marshaled to serve the U.S. government's first official cultural foreign policy. Now headlined under the notion of an internationalist cultural pluralism, music seemed especially well suited to function as a universal lingua franca to counter Axis claims to it and provide the needed cultural bond for the creation of a defensive hemispheric ecumene. At stake here was nothing less than the definition of American national identity and its role in the world. However, the effort to use American music to build and consolidate hemispheric and global alliances by projecting an image of U.S. pluralist, i.e., anti-racist and egalitarian, intentions also revived and extended hegemonic claims.

Brooklyn Cosmopolitanisms: Situated Imaginations of Metropolitan Cultures in Paul Auster's The Brooklyn Follies and Mos Def's Black on Both Sides

By Christoph Schaub
The article starts from the premise that studies of literature and rap music should be combined in order to investigate the complexities of contemporary aesthetic experiences of metropolitan cultures. Therefore, it puts into conversation the works of rap artist Mos Def and of novelist Paul Auster by way of a comparative close reading. Focusing on how social and cultural diversity and division, social fragmentation, and cosmopolitanism are staged, it explores the ways these works are characterized by tensions between foregrounded narratives of cosmopolitan inclusion and unspoken exclusions. Employing an intersectional approach and drawing on feminist standpoint theory, the article delineates the "limited location[s]" (Haraway 583) from which these artists imagine metropolitan cultures. Arguing that their imaginations of Brooklyn, NY, are respectively informed by a 'black subaltern cosmopolitanism' (Mos Def) and a '(white, middle-class) cosmopolitanism of the American Dream' (Auster), the article calls for an analytical understanding and a political construction of cosmopolitanism as fundamentally situated.

Metaphor in Rae Armantrout's Veil

By Andrew Christopher West
Rae Armantrout sees language as an intermediary that intervenes in the individual's relationship with the world. It is an intervention that invariably adulterates the individual's experience of that world. Though she understands that this intervention may be irremediable, Armantrout remains bothered by language's obfuscations and impositions. Unable to rid herself of this perturbation, she finds herself with an unflagging need to make her reader aware of language's so often unproductive work. Armantrout seeks to deconstruct metaphor as a figure of speech, turning it into what, in an interview with Daniel Kane, she calls "anti-metaphor." In so doing, Armantrout aims to prevent the reader from moving through metaphor, and so through language, to the world, leaving the reader nothing to be aware of but metaphor, but language. Yet the cognitive linguist George Lakoff has mounted a compelling argument for an understanding of the individual, language, and the world not as discrete things whose interdependence makes impossible any seeing of the world as it is, but as one continuous thing whose enactment presupposes a seeing of the world as it is. As he understands it, metaphor is not a figure of speech but a way of thinking that societies, communities, individuals, as loci of thought, use to frame a construal of the world that will motivate the language that shapes that world into something in and with which they can act. Lakoff's re-formulation suggests that Armantrout's project is problematic in three ways: First, only by making language (and metaphor) that to which her anti-metaphors refer can she focus the reader's attention on the intermediary itself; second, Armantrout's anti-metaphors, when successful as deconstructions of metaphor, still do not prevent the reader from moving through them to the concepts evoked by them and so the world entwined in those concepts; third, Armantrout's anti-metaphors cannot escape the troublesome irony that they rely on any number of basic conceptual metaphors in order to communicate the stance that they take against metaphor.

Below the Surface: Female Sexuality in Gloria Naylor's Bailey's Café

By Dorothea Buehler
Scriptural portrayals of women, such as the biblical narrative of Hagar, the Egyptian slave girl, have for centuries served as a point of reference for negotiating the complex system of sexual exploitation and victimization of black American women. Placing a shattered whore -- virgin dichotomy at the center of her work, the African American novelist Gloria Naylor offers an ambivalent portrayal of a black community that challenges the prevalent cultural location of female sexuality within a white patriarchal society. This article attempts to throw light on Naylor's liberationist and revisionist writing as an African American novelist, and to closer identify her endeavor to arrive at an image of black womanhood that is 'whole' rather than fractured due to centuries of stigmatization by misogynist Judeo-Christian traditions as well as sexual and spiritual enslavement.

"We need Martin more than ever": Interview with Cornel West on Martin Luther King, Jr., August 2011

By Christa Buschendorf
This interview is part of a larger project on the African American intellectual tradition and its impact on today's ongoing struggle for justice and equality. In two earlier, as yet unpublished, conversations that were recorded in 2009 and 2010, Cornel West and I discussed Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois. We are concerned with the special challenges of black public intellectuals and activists, e.g., with the impediments deriving from their position as outsiders in society; we consider the philosophical and political voices that helped form their own thinking as well as the social conditions that shaped them; and we reflect on the role of religion in their lives and its specific function in the black community. While Cornel West has written extensively on the black intellectual tradition in the past, his current emphasis is on the radical nature of African American political thought and its universal suppression in collective memory. As a public intellectual and activist who builds upon this very tradition, he attempts to lay bare and revitalize its revolutionary core for the sake of the radicalization of contemporary debates.

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