Founded In    2006
Published   3/year
Language(s)   English
     

Fields of Interest

 

literature, culture, the arts and "American Studies," history, social sciences, and international relations

     
ISSN   1991-9336
     
Affiliated Organization   European Association for American Studies
     
Editorial Board

The Director of this publication is the President of the European Association for American Studies, Professor Philip John Davies, The Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, London davies@eaas.eu.

Editor for literature, culture, the arts and “American Studies”: Marek Paryż (Poland)

Associate editors

John Dumbrell (Great Britain)

Andrew Gross (Germany)

Roxana Oltean (Romania)

Jean-Yves Pellegrin (France)

Editor for history, social sciences and international relations: Jenel Virden

Book Reviews Editor: Theodora Tsimpouki (Greece) tsimpouki@enl.uoa.gr

Editor for web presence: Cara Rodway (Great Britain)

Submission Guidelines and Editorial Policies

EJAS publishes both solicited and unsolicited articles. The editors also welcome proposals for special issues.

All submissions should be addressed to the Senior Editorial team in the first instance: Dr Marek Paryż (m.a.paryz@uw.edu.pl), Dr Jenel Virden (J.Virden@hull.ac.uk) and Dr Cara Rodway (cara.rodway@bl.uk).

EJAS publishes articles under the Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial license. The full terms and conditions of the license can be viewed athttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/.

Articles must be in English. Contributions should be between 5,000 and 10,000 words, unless previous arrangements have been made with the editors. The article should be preceded by a short abstract. Bibliographical references and general presentation should follow the MLA style sheet for literature, culture and the arts, and the Chicago Manual of Style for history, social sciences and international relations. In-text references should be indicated in the typescript, between parentheses, by giving the author’s surname followed by the year of publication and a page reference if necessary.

All articles will be made anonymous and handed over to two referees whose reports shall be synthesized by the editorial team and provide the basis for acceptance or rejection. In both cases the author shall be given immediate notice. Reports will be provided to authors upon request. Even when an article is accepted, the editorial board reserves the right to ask for changes, both in form and scope.

     
Mailing Address
     

Marek Paryż (m.a.paryz@uw.edu.pl)
Jenel Virden (J.Virden@hull.ac.uk)
Cara Rodway (cara.rodway@bl.uk).

Contact person responsible for updating content for ASA:
Roxana Oltean (roxana.oltean@upcmail.ro)

European Journal of American Studies

EJAS is the official, peer-reviewed academic journal of the European Association for American Studies, a federation of 21 national and joint-national associations of specialists of the United States (http://www.eaas.eu) gathering approximately 4,000 scholars from 27 European countries.

EJAS aims to foster European views on the society, culture, history, and politics of the United States, and how the US interacts with other countries in these fields. In doing so the journal places itself firmly within the continuing discussion amongst Europeans on the nature, history, importance, impact and problems of US civilization. As part of this task, EJAS wants to contribute to enriching the contents, broadening the scope, and documenting the critical examination of “American Studies” in and outside of the United States. EJAS welcomes contributions from Europe and elsewhere and endeavors to make available reliable information and state-of-the-art research on all topics within its broad field of interest. As a matter of policy, the journal will pay particular attention to objects, phenomena and issues less documented or less often debated in the United States, as well as to innovative cultural modes and the diversity of reception of United States culture abroad. Associated with this outlook, it welcomes submissions that elaborate and renew critical approaches, paradigms and methodologies, and that express varied and pluralist views.

While intended for the entire American Studies community, EJAS aims in particular to provide space for the rapid publication of quality scholarship by doctoral and post-doctoral researchers. The journal hopes to constitute a genuine forum for European Americanists of all generations, national origins and disciplinary affiliations.

 

» Visit Journal Web Site

EJAS 15.2 Summer 2020 , Volume 15, Number 2

What on Earth! Slated Globes, School Geography and Imperial Pedagogy


Manufactured by leading American globe-making companies, slated globes were adopted in the second half of the nineteenth century as educational aid materials, recommended for teaching world geography from the 4th grade on. Focusing on their production and use in the US context at the turn of the twentieth century, and following an examination of their role in teaching American children the fundaments of terrestrial geography, I probe these now forgotten, blank, black, educational table globes' capacity in offering a timely "spatial fix" to the prosaic finality of an already overly and overtly known world that the globally rising US Empire was grappling with. Provoking, in equal measure, playfulness and patriotism, I argue, slated globes were washed of imperial colors and freed of the border lines imposed on them, drained of water and emptied of landmasses, only to be once more scathed, and tattooed with lines, colors, and names, watered and landed -- in sum, to be "globed" in the hands of the generations of American youth, future stewards of the US Empire who were learning how to (re-)imagine the terra that was already made cognita by earlier colonial powers. Furthermore, I read slated globes as generative of terra incognita iterum (territory made unknown again) -- a terra incognita of a different kind and for different purposes than the terra nondum cognita (territory yet unknown) of the previous centuries: a blank fraught with colonial urges of a young empire and charged with imperial pedagogics.

Homecomings: Black Women’s Mobility in Early African American Fiction


In this article, I examine the patterns of black female mobility as represented in three African American mulatta novels: William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Iola Leroy (1893), and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins's Hagar's Daughter (1901-1902). First of all, I discuss their protagonists' movement into bondage and forced travel resulting from the withdrawal of their father's protection. Such imposed mobility is countered by the self-determined action undertaken by the black heroines not only to free themselves but also to reunite their families. As a result, their itineraries are circular rather than linear and frequently take the form of a homecoming. In contrast to the paradigm of the traditional slave narrative, which focuses on a single individual, the novels I analyze simultaneously follow two or three generations of family members. Such representations result in a chaotic aesthetics that successfully depicts the unpredictability of the fate of black families under slavery, and it foregrounds the relationality of the novels' characters.

Hollywood’s Depiction of Italian American Servicemen During the Italian Campaign of World War II


This article analyzes the portrayal of Italian American servicemen in Hollywood films set in Italy during the Italian Campaign of World War II (1943-1945) and produced from the time of the war to the present. Addressing this widely overlooked theme, the study shows how the American film industry perceived and represented one of the largest ethnic groups in the US forces, who were deployed to liberate their ancestral country from Axis control. Special attention is paid to representations of the servicemen's relationship with the Italian population and to their expressions of American patriotism.

“Being an Instance of the Norm”: Women, Surveillance and Guilt in Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road


This paper will analyze how space as both a physical environment and a social construct affects what Judith Butler calls 'gender regulations': how does the intersection of the private and the public influence the development of personal identity? How can these stereotypes be challenged within the confines of structured social and gendered hierarchies? The notion of suburbia as a physical representation of social anxieties and codified behaviours will firstly be introduced. In particular, the paper will look at how a male authoritarian rhetoric that sees happiness as a commodity rejects the idea of individual identity and serves to generate the conventional role of the all-American housewife as the only aspiration for female characters. Through an investigation into the development of different female characters, the paper will then highlight the ways in which adherence to the suburban social norm that regulates gender relationships leads to a renunciation of personhood in favour of conformity and designates the ostracisation of April Wheeler as an outcast. The semiotics of female identity that surrounds the character of April will be examined to show how this ostracisation is not only an external process of separation form society, but becomes an internalised action that leads to a fracture in the female consciousness that can only be overcome through the adoption of an alternative, extra-linguistic semiotics.

Complicating American Manhood: Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time and the Feminist Utopia as a Site for Transforming Masculinities


Contemporary feminist utopias make up an overlooked site for mining new masculinities amidst the current so-called crisis of masculinity in American culture. What is often overlooked in analyses of feminist texts and more specifically feminist utopian fiction is how the alteration of femininity necessitates the transformation of masculine ideals. Such novels, while varying in their focus, are united by an interest in transforming patriarchal masculinities and replacing them with an alternative informed by second wave and intersectional feminism. Through an analysis of masculinities in one such utopia, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), this essay traces how contemporary female speculative writers envision and propose new masculinities that, in opposition to their patriarchal counterparts, reject hierarchical perspectives and instead value equality, fraternity, and freedom.

Beyond Determinism: Geography of Jewishness in Nathan Englander's "Sister Hills" and Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union


The discourses of modern Jewish statehood have always been entangled with the notion of borders and with the tradition of religiously inspired historical determinism. The Zionist project negotiated between the God-given, predetermined character of the Jewish return to "the Holy Land" and more secular justifications for settlement in the Palestine. Nevertheless, the establishment of the State of Israel relied on a strong assertion of redrawn geographical boundaries, which were symbolically strengthened by the authority of the Biblical geography of Jewishness. This article aims to investigate how two contemporary Jewish American literary texts, Natahan Englander's "Sister Hills" (2012) and Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2008), address the stability of Jewish borders in relation to their reliance on the discourses of religious determinism. I argue that while the generic framework of a realist short story and the Israeli setting of "Sister Hills" lead it to examine the essentialism of the Biblical discourse surrounding "the Holy Land," Chabon's novel, through its adoption of a more speculative approach, which involves moving the center of Jewish statehood to Alaska, is able to open up the discourse about Jewish territoriality to more postmodern contexts and introduce free will into the geography of Jewishness.

Rummaging Through the Ashes: 9/11 American Poetry and the Transcultural Counterwitness


By drawing on current definitions of testimonial witnessing, this study returns to the attacks of September 11th to explore how two 9/11 poems, "First Writing Since (Poem on Crisis of Terror)" by Suheir Hammad and "Alabanza: In Praise of the Local 100" by Martin Espada, challenge the pervasive patriotism of mainstream journalism through acts of transcultural counterwitnessing. I explore how these 9/11 poems oppose, and engage with, pervasive patriotism, and emphasize the value of transcultural poetry in the face of extreme violence. The notion of the transcultural counterwitness has the potential to redefine how third-party witnesses, like poets, provide new understandings of historical responsibility and national identity in the American imagination.

"Challenging Borders: Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted as a Subversive Disability Memoir"


This article analyses Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted as a subversive memoir and "counter-diagnosis," relying on disability studies, women studies and critical discourse analysis. Taking advantage of the metaphoric adjective "borderline" in her diagnosis of "Borderline Personality Disorder" (BPD), Kaysen constantly emphasizes borders and boundaries -- whether topographic, mimetic or generic -- in order to cross and transgress them all the better. To achieve her goal, she relies on two major strategies of subversion, that is, abjection and carnival -- including humor, irony, "symbolic inversion" and grotesque images. Thereby, Kaysen questions not only her own diagnosis and preconceived ideas about madness -- women's madness in particular -- and mental patients, but she also challenges her recovery and the conventional genre of the disability memoir.

Un/Seeing Campus Carry: Experiencing Gun Culture in Texas


This article explores everyday experiences and visual-spatial expressions related to the implementation of SB 11, the Texas Senate Bill that allows "License to Carry" (LTC) holders to bring guns onto public university campuses. In particular, it considers the ways in which members of The University of Texas at Austin community delineate their visual-spatial surroundings and sensory perceptions on campus before and after the implementation of the Campus Carry law. It considers a range of visual interventions by lawmakers and university administrators, as well as counter-visuals created by grassroots activists, faculty, and students. Moreover, it discusses the various ways in which policies are drafted to suppress awareness of firearms from the visual topography of campus space. Drawing on Jacques Rancière's work on the political dimension of aesthetics, the research presents Campus Carry as an example of a particular aesthetic-political regime created by state legislators and negotiated by the university community. The article dem­onstrates a tension between seeing and unseeing -- remembering and forgetting -- the armed campus space and the range of visual metaphors through which firearms are discussed without ever exhibiting the actual, physical object of a gun. The focus on lived experiences that explicate the ramifications of the Campus Carry legislation in Texas contributes an important case for broader analysis of U.S. gun politics and senses of security and insecurity within educational establishments.

A Rational Continuum: Legal and Cultural Abortion Narratives in Trump’s America


Since Trump has taken office, the right to abortion is under threat. The composition of the Supreme Court can change quickly, giving the President opportunity to appoint justices he views as like-minded. This article examines Trump's 2019 State of the Union address and the anti-abortion sentiments contained within in conjunction with the rights to personal privacy and reproductive choice established and maintained by US Supreme Court cases Roe v. Wade (1973), Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), and Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt (2016). This article posits that the legal status of abortion on a federal level is resolute, but socio-cultural narratives produced by the evangelical, conservative right threaten to undermine the legitimacy of those rights. Significantly, the attempted erasure of the right to privacy established in Roe signals a distressing trend, one that can be qualified as a general loss of self-determination over one's body.

Measuring the power of parties within US Government from 1993 to 2018: New key variables


The article describes a new theoretical framework and empirical method to understand the power of parties within the U.S. Government. Political parties are not simply critical means by which citizens participate in their government, but also foundational to a pluralist political society and play an active role in defending the constitutional principles of liberal institutions and democracy. The first part of the article provides an overall glance of the dimensions used for observing the political power during democratic crises. Then, it is concerned with the identification of some "compelling" dimensions of political behavior of parties, and an empirical analysis of the changes occurred in the American institutions conducted in a long-term perspective of the last 25 years. Indeed, the second part accurately refers to the degree of which its political balances, institutional guarantees and constitutional design provide effective defense to democracy. Finally, these results invite us to watch at the current troubles with a moderate share of realism on the future capacity of democracy in the U.S. to survive.

Empire?


This study on empire is the product of a professional union between a historian and a political scientist and it hopes to connect discussions and conclusions from history with discussions and conclusions in political science. But the aim of this work is not simply to start some sort of open discussion between two groups of scholars who interpret the same events rather differently. Instead, it also aims to synthesize some key literatures and attempts to demonstrate that political science and international relations scholars, and perhaps others as well, would gain some intellectual purchase from more carefully countenancing works from history and other fields as they consider empires; by doing so we hope to open up discussions of empire even further, making the subject "more visible". Finally, this research helps locate and place the United States within broad discussions about the current state and future of imperial polities.

American Messiahs: The Narrative Strategies of FDR and Reagan, 1933 and 1981


This article investigates the rhetoric of Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan when they took office, in 1933 and in 1981, at two moments of crisis. More specifically, it compares and contrasts the stories the two presidents told the American people through their speeches. It finds that the stories had strong parallels: Roosevelt and Reagan both depicted America as a land in decay, and portrayed themselves as messiahs who would redeem the nation. Ultimately, this article argues that the presidents both used story as strategy. That is to say their stories had a political endgame. Indeed, Roosevelt's and Reagan's messianic stories were tools to help transform American political ethos, and in so doing foster support for their reform agendas.

Only Dead Metaphors Can Be Resurrected: A Review of Jill Lepore’s These Truths


Traditionally, U.S. history textbooks announce a civic function when aimed at U.S. readers: they exist to read America into the future, to imply a futurity for the American "experiment." But present-day political breakdown has presented deep challenges for the familiar national narrative. Jill Lepore's recent synthesis -- These Truths: A History of the United States (2018) -- is the most prominent such text to emerge in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. It represents the pinnacle of liberal nationalist historiography and will likely take its place on college syllabi inside and outside the United States. It is also the most substantial attempt in recent years to revive the national history as a serious intellectual genre. This essay takes the form of a narratological interpretation of These Truths. The book is an occasion to consider what national history is and what it is for.

Other Issues

EJAS 15.1 2020 Special Issue: Truth or Post-Truth?, Volume 15, Number 1
EJAS 14.4 2019 Special Issue: Spectacle and Spectatorship in American Culture Volume 14, Number 4, Volume 14, Number 4
EJAS 14.3 2019 Special Issue: Harriet Prescott Spofford: The Home, the Nation, and the Wilderness, Volume 14, Number 3
EJAS 14.2 Summer 2019, Volume 14, Number 2
EJAS 14.1 2019 Special Issue: Race Matters: 1968 as Living History in the Black Freedom Struggle, Volume 14, Number 1
EJAS 13.4 2018 Special Issue: Envisioning Justice: Mediating the Question of Rights in American Visual Culture, Volume 13, Number 4
EJAS 13.3 2018 Special Issue: America to Poland: Cultural Transfers and Adaptations, Volume 13, Number 3
EJAS 13.2 Summer 2018, Volume 13, Number 2
EJAS 12.4 2017 Special Issue: Sound and Vision: Intermediality and American Music, Volume 12, Number 4
EJAS 12.3 2017 Special Issue: Cormac McCarthy Between Worlds , Volume 12, Number 3
EJAS 12.2 2017 Summer Special Issue: Popularizing Politics. The 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, Volume 12, Number 2
EJAS 12.2 Summer 2017 , Volume 12, Number 2
EJAS 12.1 Spring 2017 Special Issue: Eleanor Roosevelt and Diplomacy in the Public Interest, Volume 12, Number 1
EJAS 11.3 2016 Special Issue: Re-Queering The Nation: America's Queer Crisis , Volume 11, Number 3
EJAS 11.2 2016, Volume 11, Number 2
EJAS 11.1 2016 Special Issue: Intimate Frictions: History and Literature in the United States from the 19th to the 21st Century, Volume 11, Number 1
EJAS 10.3 2015 Special Issue: The City , Volume 10, Number 3
EJAS 10.2 Summer 2015 Special Issue: (Re)visioning America in the Graphic Novel, Volume 10, Number 2
EJAS 10.2 Summer 2015, Volume 10, Number 2
EJAS 10.1 Winter 2015 Special Issue: Women in the USA , Volume 10, Number 1
EJAS 9.3 2014 Special Issue: Transnational Approaches to North American Regionalism, Volume 9, Number 3
EJAS 9.2 Summer 2014, Volume 9, Number 2
EJAS 9.1 Spring 2014, Volume 9, Number 1
EJAS 8.1 2013, Volume 8, Number 1
EJAS 7.2 2012 Special Issue: Wars and New Beginnings in American History, Volume 7, Number 2
EJAS 7.1 Spring 2012, Volume 7, Number 1
EJAS 6.3 2011 Special Issue: Postfrontier Writing, Volume 6, Number 3
EJAS 6.2 2011 Special Issue: Oslo Conference, Volume 6, Number 11
EJAS 6.1 Spring 2011, Volume 6, Number 11
EJAS 5.4 2010 Special Issue: Film, Volume 5, Number 4
EJAS 5.3 Summer 2010, Volume 5, Number 3
EJAS 5.2 2010 Special Issue:The North-West Pacific in the 18th and 19th Centuries, Volume 5, Number 2
EJAS 5.1 Spring 2010, Number 5, Volume 1
EJAS 4.3 2009 Special Issue: Immigration, Volume 4, Number 3
EJAS 4.2 Autumn 2009, Volume 4, Number 2
EJAS 4.1 Spring 2009, Volume 4, Number 1
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