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aspeers: emerging voices in american studies
The editors at aspeers recognize the quality and importance of work being done at the graduate level in European American Studies Institutions. Therefore, aspeers seeks to give emerging scholars a voice: A platform to showcase their work beyond the graduate classroom and a forum for discussion and exchange. We believe that such wider circulation of graduate scholarship has great potential to further energize the field of American Studies. At the same time, aspeers offers emerging scholars the unique opportunity to publish and get recognition for their research at an early point in their careers. For more information please reference our call for papers (www.aspeers.com/cfp), or visit our website at www.aspeers.com. aspeers is a project within the American Studies MA Program at the University of Leipzig, Germany. With most members of the reviewing editorial staff being MA candidates, it currently is the only peer-reviewed publication channel for graduate students in European American Studies programs. |
aspeers 3 (2010) - Crime and America, 3
With its 2010 issue, aspeers focuses on crime in America as well as the disciplinary ‘contact zones’ between the study of crime and American studies. Being always both a real-life act and a larger discursive construct, ‘crime’ proves to be an immensely productive concept for a variety of fields and questions.
Foreword
Introduction: Crime and America
Art Project: Embroidered Tags
The Ever-Ticking Bomb: Examining 24’s Promotion of Torture against the Background of 9/11
Drawing on the theory of collective trauma and the increased
display of torture on TV since 2001, this paper investigates how the
repercussions of 9/11 serve as a basis for the popularity of the TV
series 24 and how its success impacts the cultural and political landscape
of the US. This article argues that 24 justifies and promotes the use of
torture as a method of interrogation and cites evidence of references to
the series in political and juridical discourse. It shows how national
trauma may increase the appeal of extreme violence against suspected
terrorists and how 24's conflation of fact and fiction falls on fertile
ground in a post-9/11 culture of fear. Examples from 24 are used to
give insight into the way the audience is confronted with so-called ticking
bomb scenarios in order to increase acceptance for the criminal and
unethical behavior of 24's protagonist Jack Bauer. Furthermore, I will
cite government reports and observations from military instructors as
examples of the influence Jack Bauer's use of torture has had on soldiers
and interrogators in Iraq and Afghanistan. In order to complement the
existing evidence of a political bias towards the legitimization of torture
in 24, my article inspects statements from the creators and writers of 24
and scrutinizes their choice to respond to criticism within a subplot of
the seventh season.
Poem: John White Defends
Interview
Photography: L.A. Crash
From Shakespeare’s Kings to Scorsese’s Kingpins: Contemporary Mob Movies and the Genre of Tragedy
Following a path established in Robert Warshow's chapter on
"The Gangster as Tragic Hero," this article attempts to look at
connections between the ancient genre of tragedy and contemporary
mob movies. On the one hand, there are structural parallels when it
comes to plot, which adheres to the formula of decline, brought about
by erroneous judgments. On the other hand, mobsters are often
portrayed as powerful, ruthless tyrants who retain a kind of
Shakespearean grandeur. Using examples from films by Michael Mann,
Martin Scorsese, and Ridley Scott, my argument links contemporary
American crime drama to the origins of tragedy (as laid out by Aristotle
in Poetics) and some canonical examples of the genre, like The Merchant of
Venice. Having established this theoretical framework, I shall offer a
detailed discussion of Martin Scorsese's The Departed, one of the most
successful mob movies in recent years. In this film, Scorsese toys with
the tragic genre both on the level of plot and with regard to his flawed
characters, who struggle to overcome guilt and tragic hubris, yet cannot
escape their inevitable tragic downfall.
Poem: Grace Before Meals
Farbrekhers in America: The Americanization of Jewish Blue-Collar Crime, 1900-1931
The mass immigration of Eastern European Jews between
1880 and 1924 -- some two and a half million came to the United States
-- caused a thorough change in the nature of New York Jewry. Following
wealthier German uptown Jews, it was now marked by poor Polish or
Russian Jews living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The Jewish
quarters functioned as the hinges between Eastern Europe and the US
for many immigrants. Crime was a shade of it. Jews only constituted a
small minority of American society; their Americanized criminal
structures, however, became one of the most influential factors of
modernization of crime from the fringes to the center of American
society. Through the development of the Jewish underworld, the
exclusion of and the cooperation with criminals of a different ethnic
background, as well as the professionalization and the struggle for
respectability, the phenomenon of Jewish blue-collar crime itself
experienced an Americanization. Additionally, this process of
Americanization was key not only to the rise but also to the downfall of
Jewish American blue-collar crime in New York.
Art Project: Freeze revisited
Other Issues
aspeers 11 (2018), 11
aspeers 9 (2016) - American Youth, 9
aspeers 10 (2017), 10
aspeers 8 (2015) - American Health, 8
aspeers 7 (2014) - American Anxieties, 7
aspeers 6 (2013) - American Memories, 6
aspeers 5 (2012) - American Food Cultures, 5
aspeers 4 (2011) - Nature and Technology, Revisited, 4
aspeers 2 (2009) - Migration and Mobility, 2
aspeers 1 (2008), 1
aspeers 14 (2021), 14
aspeers 13 (2020), 13
aspeers 12 (2019), 12