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Beyond the ‘Futureless Future’: Edward O. Bland, Afro-Modernism and The Cry of Jazz

By William Sites
American Studies

Recent Articles

  • Precarious Locations: Streaming TV and Global Inequalities
  • “To Help Enlighten Our People”: ‘Theater Folk’ and Stage Advice Columns in the 1920s Chicago Defende
  • The Confession of an Uncontrived Sinner: Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”

Announcements

04.13.21: American Studies (AMSJ) congratulations Dr. Emily Lutenski, winner of Don D. Walker Prize!
American Studies

Congratulations to Dr. Emily Lutenski who was awarded the Don D. Walker Prize by the Western Literature Association,for her essay, “Dickens Disappeared: Black Los Angeles and the Borderlands of Racial Memory,” published in the special issue, “New Directions in Black Western Studies” in American Studies 58.3 (2019).

01.03.19: Journal of Transnational American Studies newest issue out now (JTAS 9.1)
Journal of Transnational American Studies

Table of Contents | JTAS 9.1
Note from the Editor-in-Chief | Nina Morgan
Introduction by Issue Editors | Nina Morgan and Sabine Kim

ARTICLES
Collecting Native America: John Lloyd Stephens and the Rhetoric of Archaeological Value
Christen Mucher (Smith College)

‘to transplant in alien soil’: Race, Nation, Citizenship, and the Idea of Emigration in the Revolutionary Atlantic
Westenley Alcenat (Fordham University)

Anticolonial Anti-Intervention: Puerto Rican Independentismo and the US ‘Anti-Intervention’ Left inReagan-era Boston
Eric D. Larson (University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth)

‘Agrarians or Anarchists?’: Cuba Solidarity, State Surveillance, and the FBI as Biographer and Archivist
Teishan A. Latner (Thomas Jefferson University)

Foreign Means to Local Ends: Bialik, Emerson, and the Uses of America in 1920s Palestine
Nir Evron (Tel Aviv University)

REPRISE
Reprise Editor’s Note | Nina Morgan
“Benjamin Rush’s Travels Towards Peace”
David Bradley

SPECIAL FORUM: DISRUPTING GLOBALIZATION
Special Forum | Begoña Simal-González and José Liste-Noya

Introduction: Disrupting Globalization—The Transnational and American Literature
Begoña Simal-González (Universidade da Coruña)

Translational Form in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being
Claire Gullander-Drolet (Brown University)

Anthologizing ‘Little Calibans’: Surplus in Junot Díaz’s Linked Stories
Janet Zong York (Harvard University)

Mapping the Transnational in Contemporary Native American Fiction: Silko and Welch
Lori Merish (Georgetown University)

Exotic Arabs and American Anxiety: Representations of Culinary Tourism in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent
Mandala White (University of Canterbury, New Zealand)

Postethnicity and Antiglobalization in Chicana/o Science Fiction: Hogan’s Smoking Mirror Blues, and Sánchez and Pita’s Lunar Braceros 2125-214
Elsa del Campo Ramírez (University of Nebrija)

Being True to the trans-: Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand and the Transglobal Imagination
José Liste- Noya (Universidade da Coruña)

FORWARD
Forward Editor’s Note | Greg Robinson

Karen M. Inouye, The Long Afterlife of Japanese American Incarceration (Stanford University Press, 2016)
Rajender Kaur and Anupama Arora, India in the American Imaginary, 1780s-1880s (Palgrave, 2017)
Ana Raquel Minian, Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration (Harvard University Press, 2018)
Phuong Tran Nguyen, Becoming Refugee American: The Politics of Rescue in Little Saigon (University of Illinois Press, 2017)
Rachel Pistol, Internment During the Second World War (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017)
Greg Robinson, “Eleanor Roosevelt in Montreal: Human Rights and Internationalism in World War II” (Bulletin d’histoire politique, 2018)
Claudia Sadowski-Smith, The New Immigrant Whiteness: Race, Neoliberalism, and Post-Soviet Migration to the United States (New York University Press, 2018)
Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci, Contraceptive Diplomacy: Reproductive Politics and Imperial Ambitions in the United States and Japan (Stanford University Press, 2018)
Takayuki Tatsumi, “Origins of Originality: Poe—Hawthorne—Noguchi,” from Young Americans in Literature: The Post-Romantic Turn in the Age of Poe, Hawthorne and Melville (Tokyo: Sairyusha, 2018)

Article Abstracts
‘to transplant in alien soil’: Race, Nation, Citizenship, and the Idea of Emigration in the Revolutionary Atlantic
Westenley Alcenat
The emigration of African Americans to Haiti throughout the nineteenth century was influenced by the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). Looking beyond this influence as mere legacy, this article proposes that scholars begin to interrogate the relationship that developed between African American Black Nationalists and Haitian allies. The article explores whether the emigration by African Americans to postrevolutionary Haiti during the nineteenth century was a political rejection of the US. Or was it an opportunity to explore the possibilities of democratic citizenship—the right to have rights—that only Haiti had to offer, in the hope of promoting genuine democracy in the United States, as well? Why, in spite of their insistence that they, too, were Americans, did some African Americans accept the invitation by Haitian revolutionaries to board a ship to the island republic? Black emigration, I argue, was not born of racial solidarity. Rather, it was the political consequence of racial exclusion.

Foreign Means to Local Ends: Emerson, Bialik and the Uses of America in 1920s Palestine | Nir Evron
In 1926, Haim Nachman Bialik, the premier poet and leading intellectual light of the Zionist movement, sailed for New York on a five-month-long fundraising mission on behalf of the yishuv, the pre-statehood Jewish settlement in Palestine. After his return, the poet gave a long speech in Tel Aviv, recounting his impressions of the United States before an audience of thousands. The America that Bialik presented to his listeners, this essay begins by arguing, should be read as tissue of widely circulating tropes and mythemes, which the poet had absorbed during his formative years in Europe as well as in the course of his 1926 tour. The essay then proceeds to discuss the uses to which the poet puts this (largely borrowed) narrative of American difference, focusing in particular on Bialik’s ambivalent response to the futural (largely Emersonian) ethos to which he returns time and again in his speech, and which he seems to simultaneously endorse and reject. The main part of the essay’s argument is devoted to making sense of this ambivalence, which I attribute to the diverging “temporal imaginaries” that underwrite Zionist and American exceptionalisms.

Anticolonial Anti-Intervention: Puerto Rican Independentismo and the U.S. ‘Anti-Intervention’ Left in Reagan-era Boston
Eric D. Larson
Scholars of the post-1968 transnational left have increasingly criticized liberal frameworks that suggest that transnational politics fundamentally revolve around solidarity relationships between full citizens of distinct nation-states. The literature on the movements that opposed US military and political intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1970s and 1980s has also shifted to better illuminate the fundamental roles migrants, refugees, politically targeted activists, and minoritized groups have played in contesting US intervention, particularly in Central America. This article adds a layer to that discussion by examining how diasporic Puerto Rican activists helped galvanize anti-intervention movements in Boston in the 1980s. It shows how El Colectivo Puertorriqueño de Boston (the Puerto Rican Collective of Boston) developed what I call a politics of “anticolonial anti-intervention” that directly related empire “over there” to racialized colonialism in the urban US. They grappled with what it meant to live in a colonial diaspora as they helped build anti-intervention organizing in Boston. They centered the demand for Puerto Rican independence yet linked it to their resistance to US intervention elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean. They recalibrated independentista visions of self-rule, including through an updated version of community control, in the Reagan era. In doing so they challenged the implicitly white politics of rescue, aid, and deracialized Marxism that prevailed in much of Boston’s anti-intervention movement.

‘Agrarians or Anarchists?’: Cuba Solidarity, State Surveillance, and the FBI as Biographer and Archivist | Teishan A. Latner
In the late 1960s, as thousands of Americans traveled to Cuba to evaluate the nation’s evolving revolutionary process, the FBI launched a surveillance campaign designed to prove that travel to the communist island by US citizens represented a threat to national security. Focusing on the FBI’s investigation of the Venceremos Brigade, a radical humanitarian organization that sent delegations of Americans to Cuba as volunteers for agricultural and construction projects, this article evaluates the FBI’s claims that Cuba was indoctrinating leftwing Americans with revolutionary theory and training them in guerrilla warfare. But while state surveillance was intended to criminalize the Venceremos Brigade in legal terms and demonize it within the popular imaginary, it failed to reveal any prosecutable evidence of criminality. Instead, the FBI’s efforts inadvertently transformed it into the group’s clandestine biographer, as agents produced a substantial archive of print material on the group. Amassing thousands of pages of surveillance, including rare pamphlets and ephemera, the FBI’s unofficial archive unexpectedly confirmed the liberatory and humanist aspirations of the Brigade. Although there is a dearth of scholarship on the Venceremos Brigade, the longest-lived Cuba solidarity organization in the world, the FBI’s files remain the most extensive archive on the group ever produced, surpassing any university’s holdings. Files on the Venceremos Brigade illustrate the manner in which counternarratives can surface even within the body of the state’s archives on grassroots political movements, narratives that are potent enough to challenge the power of the state’s evidence deployed against them.

Collecting Native America: John Lloyd Stephens and the Rhetoric of Archaeological Value | Christen Mucher
This article focuses on the representations of Maya statues made by archaeologist-explorer John Lloyd Stephens and his artistic collaborator Frederick Catherwood in the 1840s. While Stephens’s and Catherwood’s trips to Central America, Mexico, and the Yucatán were meant to provide material objects for a Pan-American museum of Native American “antiquities,” the statues themselves were never exhibited to the public. Nonetheless, the visual and literary representations of the Maya “idols” circulating across North and Central America as well as Europe incited international interest and dramatically increased similar statues’ monetary value. Stephens’s valuation of Indigenous objects as possessable historical relics rested on the transformation of Indigenous bodies into laborers and Indigenous homelands into saleable property; their representation as mystical “idols” merely concealed this transformation. What is more, the historical and monetary value of the relics collected by Stephens was eventually surpassed by their textual reproductions. These representations—rather than the artifacts or communities behind them—set a persistent pattern for the study and evaluation of Native American “culture” as demonstrated by the textual afterlives of Stephens’s work.

Special Forum Abstracts
Postethnicity and Antiglobalization in Chicana/o Science Fiction: Ernest Hogan’s Smoking Mirror Blues, and Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita’s Lunar Braceros 2125-2148 | Elsa del Campo Ramírez
During the past decades, science fiction has evidenced an often-unacknowledged problematic brought to the forefront by advocates of alter-globalization: the future is (still) predominantly white, masculine, and globally built on indigenous exploitation. In the era of multinational capitalism, the trend towards an apparent postnationalism paradoxically risks leading towards what Lysa Rivera has described as a “Fourth World [which] promotes the ‘multiplication of frontiers and the smashing apart of nations’ and indigenous communities.” Simultaneously, the increase of ethnic transnational conflicts in a globalized world has prompted the pursuit of a utopian postethnic future that seeks social harmony but seems to be spiraling into the erosion of the American ethnic paradigm through the configuration of nonspecific and inconsistent ethnic categories, derived from the “lumping of all indigenous people into one category,” as Linda Alcoff claims. This paper aims at exploring the Chicana/o cultural and ethnic identity in the context of multinational capitalism through its articulation and dissolution in the realm of science fiction, where issues such as postethnicity and its intricate connection with corporate globalization are discussed. The study will focus on the analysis of two novels: Smoking Mirror Blues (2001), by Ernest Hogan, and one instance of what Catherine Ramírez has termed ‘Chicanafuturism,’ Lunar Braceros 2125-2148 (2009), by Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita.

Translational Form in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being | Claire Gullander-Drolet
Through a close reading of the tropes of interlingual and historical translation in Ruth Ozeki’s 2013 novel, A Tale for the Time Being, this essay argues that an attention to forms of translational work has important implications for transnational American studies, particularly in reorienting the field beyond its continental US and anglocentric bounds. Taking as its primary object of inquiry the “voluminous influx” of national, racial, and linguistic ‘otherness’ that David Palumbo-Liu describes as “a distinct feature of late twentieth century and early twenty first century age of globalization,” A Tale for the Time Being highlights translation’s central (and often acknowledged) role in shaping the ways in which that otherness is negotiated across geographical and temporal meridians. My reading of the novel’s translational form is twofold. I begin by considering the import of this intervention to the field of Asian American literary studies, focusing on how Ozeki mobilizes the formal elements of interlingual translation to push back against naturalizing conceptions of Asian / American identity. I then apply this translational framework to the divergent accounts of history in the novel and argue that—by calling attention to the fissures and gaps in these narratives—Ozeki offers a new model of empathic reading, one that draws herself and her readers together through a logic of “not knowing.” 

Being True to the trans-: Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand and the Transglobal Imagination | José Liste-Noya
To imagine the transnational within or as the outcome of a rapidly globalizing environment is to imagine, as Jean-Luc Nancy has proposed, the ambivalent “worlding” of the world. This notion tries to account for the currently polarized ambivalence of a globalized “totality,” a world where globalization effectively manifests itself in totalizing, hierarchical terms rather than in the shifting differential shapes of the “multiple” that it nevertheless brings into view. This dichotomy within the global or the transnational derives, perhaps, from the obdurate presence of the “national” conceived in still essentializing if not always geographically-centred ways that limit the transformative effect of the “trans-” itself. To truly imagine the transnational one might have to envisage the trans-global; much as the processes of globalization have revealed the intrinsic presence of the transnational within the national, perhaps a truly global view of the world, the world truly seen as a “globe,” is only possible from a trans-global perspective. The literary genre that most fully explores and envisions such possibilities is, of course, science-fiction, possibly the mode of fictional representation most attuned to the birth pangs of the (trans)global. The genre’s visionary tendency echoes the politically utopian imaginings of the transnational. It does so, however, in nuanced masterworks such as Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by imagining otherwise, employing the rhetorical and conceptual effects of science-fiction to both pose and question the socio-political and cultural-technological transformations that have given rise to the consciousness of the global but which have also been channeled into directions that impede a true dawning of the transnational. This essay will focus, then, on how the science-fictional imaginings of Delany’s 1984 novel presciently encounter and critically counter the limitations that characterize a transnational or global imaginary that resists still the uncontainable multiplicity of (a) world(s).

Mapping the Transnational in Contemporary Native American Fiction: Silko and Welch | Lori Merish
Revisiting the terrain of the 2012 JTAS Special Forum, “Charting Transnational Native American Studies,” this essay argues both that the transnational is a valuable, productive lens for understanding Native American literature, and that a consideration of Native American texts is indispensable to the “transnational turn” in Americanist literary scholarship. The essay argues that Native American literary texts engage the transnational in three ways: affirming “America” as transnational cultural space from its inception by staging ways Native cultures’ “dis-identif[y] with the nation”; affirming the transnational complexity of Native cultures; and registering Pan-Indian and indigenous transnationalisms vitally alive in the present. The essay advances these claims through readings of two recent historical novels by major Native American authors: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens of the Dunes (2000), and James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk (2001).  Both novels are set in the late nineteenth century, a critical period in Native American history, especially in the American West; and both novels map complex itineraries for Native American characters who travel abroad, scripting transnationalism in diasporic terms. The essay argues that Silko’s novel portrays transnational encounter as global transindigeneity, casting the transnational as a vehicle to awaken and activate feminist and especially ecofeminist transindigenous solidarities, while Welch employs the form of the transnational bildungsroman to make visible tribal processes of cultural adaptation and transnational dimensions of tribal cultures at “home.”   

Exotic Arabs and American Anxiety: Representations of Culinary Tourism in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent | Mandala White
In this essay, I examine the way in which Diana Abu-Jaber’s novel, Crescent, presents an exoticised Arabic culture and the relationship of this to a post-9/11 American culture eclipsed by anxieties about terrorism. I am primarily concerned with the text’s representation of what I call “culinary tourism”—its characters’ attempts to access culture (and Arabic culture in particular)—through eating. Food becomes a vehicle through which the text critically explores the dialectics of a post-9/11 American exoticism: the fear of a vaguely defined Arabic or Islamic culture, on the one hand, and the potential for its strangeness to be seen as fascinating on the other. I argue that Crescent is a conflicted novel that presents an exoticised representation of culture through its depiction of food, and yet cannot seem to wholly abandon itself to its own systems of exoticism. On the one hand, as I discuss in Part One of this essay, the novel’s representations of food are a vehicle through which it critiques its characters’ engagement with stereotypes, a mode of cultural interaction which Homi Bhabha argues is always afflicted by anxiety. However, on the other hand, as I discuss in Part Two of this essay, the florid language and imagery it uses in its representations of food reveal its reliance upon the same discourses of exoticism it critiques, and possession by the same kinds of anxieties about Arabic culture that afflict its characters.

Anthologizing “Little Calibans”: Surplus in Junot Díaz’s Linked Stories | Janet Zong York
Anthologizing stories from linked short story collections gives rise to a troubling tension. To select and curate a story in an anthology elevates it to paradigmatic status. Yet, linked collections are anti-paradigmatic: interweaving fragments, rejecting representative conventions and monolithic narratives, and producing a surplus of feeling and knowledge beyond individual stories. These qualities become obscure when reading a single story contextualized in an anthology. This tension is particularly evident with anthologization of authors like Junot Díaz, whose works are suspicious of neoliberal multiculturalism’s totalizing embrace, but whose inclusion as an ethnic, national, or world writer in different anthologies results in varied thematic framings specific to each. Juxtaposing the linked story in two settings, anthology and linked collection, expands scholarly conversations around emergent forms of transnational American literature. This article argues that linked collections preempt, primarily through formal means, the flattening and functionalizing of their stories into unified exemplars of multicultural diversity or universal experience. Examining stories from Díaz’s Drown and This is How You Lose Her alongside these same tales as framed in three Norton anthologies illustrates this possibility. Díaz develops a paradigm of surplus through stories connected by a sense of displacement. This surplus is a literary strategy that anticipates and addresses anthology curation’s effects and expectations. Rather than recuperating identity or loss to construct more unified notions of ethnicity, nation, or world, linked stories give shape to assembled fragments. They point toward a transnationalism invested in how narrative fragments of displacement and diaspora constitute an irreducible surplus.

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09.11.14: Call for Papers - Death in the Cityscape
Canadian Review of American Studies

Call for Papers - Canadian Review of American Studies
Death in the Cityscape

In contemporary literature, the intersection of the space of death and mourning within the confines of the city acts as a method of critiquing our understood modes of living. Since Plato’s Republic, the uneasy interplay of death and memorialization within the polis has been considered. Theorists like Gillian Rose in Mourning Becomes the Law and Sharon Zukin in Naked City have elaborated upon the discourse of space, death, and mourning within an urban setting. This issue of finding a space within the city for the dead remains with us, and recent American economic turmoil places the urban metropolis and its spaces of decay in sharp focus (seen in novels like Teju Cole’s Open City, television shows like The Wire and movies such as Synecdoche, New York). Where in the city is death (dis)allowed? Under what authority does the city, as a social nexus point, memorialize the dead? How does art work in concert with, or against, accepted practices of mourning and memorializing within the city limits? Can one mourn the passing of a city and, if so, how is this enacted? While this abstract focuses primarily on contemporary American work, we welcome papers related to any period of American urban history.

We invite scholarly articles on this topic in any genre of American studies. Submissions should be no more than 8000 words in length. Abstracts of no more than 250 words will be accepted until December 1, 2014. Completed articles must be submitted by April 1, 2015.

Send abstracts and submissions to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Possible topics may include:
- Death’s relationship to identity in the American city
- American Cities Characterized
- Post-9/11 American Cities and Identity
- Death and Mourning in the City
- Death and Public Art
- Memorials and Public Mourning
- Urban American: Recession and After

Keywords:
- African-American
- Children’s Literature
- Cultural Studies and Historical Approaches
- Ecocriticism and Environmental Studies
- Ethnicity and National Identity
- Film and Television
- Gender Studies and Sexuality
- Interdisciplinary
- Literary Modernism
- Popular Culture
- Postcolonialism
- Postmodernism and Postmodern culture
- Theatre Studies
- Twenty-First Century Literature
- Visual Art and Culture

01.03.22: aspeers Call for Papers by American Studies Students at European Universities by 17 October 2021
aspeers: emerging voices in american studies

1) General Call for Papers

For the general section of its fifteenth issue, aspeers seeks outstanding academic writing demonstrating the excellence of graduate scholarship, the range of concerns scrutinized in the field, and the diversity of perspectives employed. We thus explicitly invite revised versions of term papers or chapters from theses written by students of European Master (and equivalent) programs. For this section, there are no topical limitations. Contributions should be up to 7,500 words (including abstract and list of works cited). The submission deadline is October 17, 2021.

2) Topical Call for Papers on “American Bodies”

When Serena Williams wore a ‘catsuit’ during the 2018 French Open, this choice of clothing was banned because it allegedly showed a lack of “respect” for the game of tennis. The decision, and the overall incident, caused an uproar that went well beyond the world of sports, with many commentators criticizing the ban as a punishment directly aimed at policing women’s bodies. Such practices align with a long history of regulating especially Black and female bodies in the United States, from the Middle Passage and the institution of slavery dehumanizing Black bodies to the physical perils encountered by immigrants coming into the country, from deriding ‘non-normative’ bodies in nineteenth-century freak and minstrel shows to contemporary fights over women’s reproductive rights.

Bodies, and processes of embodiment, loom large in cultural imaginations of America. More recently, investigations into the corporeal have been invigorated by insights from fields like disability studies, fat studies, or the medical humanities and through impulses from queer and affect theory that continue to productively complicate mind-body dichotomies. How specific cultural artifacts, scientific developments, or political decisions imagine bodies, regulate them, imperil them, mark them, or differentiate between them thus does particularly noteworthy cultural work in the United States—something that is always intricately connected to questions of power and control.

For its fifteenth issue, aspeers dedicates its topical section to “American Bodies” and invites European graduate students to critically and analytically explore American literature, (popular) culture, society, history, politics, and media through the lens of the body (or bodies) in the US. We welcome papers from all fields, methodologies, and approaches comprising American studies as well as interdisciplinary submissions. Potential paper topics could cover (but are not limited to):

Narratives, images, or representations of bodies in literature, film, television, comics, games, nonfiction, etc.

Analyses of how bodies are gendered, raced, classed, aged, sexualized, pathologized, etc., and of the complex intersections between these processes

Historical discussions of the role of bodies, e.g. in fields such as sports, migration (especially within the Americas), policing, medicine, war, the history of violence, etc.

Processes of embodiment and disembodiment, e.g. in digital culture

Explorations of the figurative work of ‘bodies,’ e.g. as political or economic bodies, regulatory bodies, etc.

aspeers, the first and currently only graduate-level peer-reviewed print journal of European American studies, encourages fellow MA students from all fields to reflect on the diverse meanings of “American Bodies.” We welcome term papers, excerpts from theses, or papers specifically written for the fifteenth issue of aspeers by October 17, 2021. If you seek to publish work beyond this topic, please refer to our general Call for Papers. Please consult our submission guidelines and find some additional tips at http://www.aspeers.com/2022.

01.03.22: aspeers Call for Papers by American Studies Students at European Universities by 25 October 2020
aspeers: emerging voices in american studies

1) General Call for Papers

For the general section of its fourteenth issue, aspeers seeks outstanding academic writing demonstrating the excellence of graduate scholarship, the range of concerns scrutinized in the field of American studies, and the diversity of perspectives employed. We thus explicitly invite revised versions of term papers or chapters from theses written by students of European Master (and equivalent) programs. For this section, there are no topical limitations. Contributions should be up to 7,500 words (including abstract and list of works cited). The submission deadline is October 25, 2020.

2) Topical Call for Papers on “Narratives of American Colonization and Imperialism”

400 years ago, the Mayflower arrived on Patuxet land and established the settler colony of Plymouth. Just two years later, the Patuxet peoples were pronounced extinct. Despite or due to this settler violence, the Plymouth colony gave rise to the American tradition of “Thanksgiving” and the mythology of Europeans building a ‘City upon a Hill’ in America.

200 years later, in 1820, eighty-six free black ‘immigrants’ traversed the Atlantic to establish the first settlement in Liberia. This was sponsored by the American Colonization Society (ACS). The ACS’s core belief was that Black freedom—Black voting, Black landowning, Black civil liberties—was incompatible with (white) American ideals and democracy, and that founding colonies in Africa promised to thus ‘whiten’ the US.

Now, in 2020, the United States has hundreds of military bases worldwide, spreading across scores of different countries and housing, according to some estimates, about 200,000 troops. Even though the US is technically a nation, its ubiquitous global influence on economies, politics, and cultures constitutes it as an empire.

For its fourteenth issue, aspeers dedicates its topical section to “Narratives of American Colonization and Imperialism” and invites European graduate students to critically and analytically explore the United States’ long history and contemporary culture of colonial violence. We invite papers discussing American literature, history, (popular) culture, society, politics, and media through the lens of American colonization and imperialism. We also encourage authors to consider the manifold connections between the United States and other parts of the Americas, especially the Caribbean as well as Central and Latin America, in the context of these questions.

Topical submissions may consider:

representations of colonization in literature, (popular) culture, and other media

identities and sociopolitical group formations forged around narratives of ‘America’

the role that narratives of America as a colonizing force have played in defining identities

alternatives and resistance to US colonization and imperialism

practices of ‘writing back’ against colonial or imperial rule

constructions of race and gender in the context of (white) imperial violence

aspeers, the first and currently only graduate-level peer-reviewed journal of European American studies, encourages fellow MA students from all fields to reflect on the diverse meanings of “Narratives of American Colonization and Imperialism.” We welcome term papers, excerpts from theses, or papers specifically written for the fourteenth issue of aspeers by October 25, 2020. If you are seeking to publish work beyond this topic, please refer to our general Call for Papers. Please consult our submission guidelines and find some additional tips at http://www.aspeers.com/2021.

01.03.22: aspeers Call for Papers by American Studies Students at European Universities by 27 October 2019
aspeers: emerging voices in american studies

1) General Call for Papers

For the general section of its thirteenth issue, aspeers seeks outstanding academic writing demonstrating the excellence of graduate scholarship, the range of concerns scrutinized in the field of American studies, and the diversity of perspectives employed. We thus explicitly invite revised versions of term papers or chapters from theses written by students of European Master (and equivalent) programs. For this section, there are no topical limitations. Contributions should be up to 7,500 words (including abstract and list of works cited). The submission deadline is October 27, 2019.

2) Topical Call for Papers on “Pride and Shame in America”

In June 2019, Stonewall 50 marked the largest LGBTQ+ event in history. Half a century ago, after the NYPD raids on the Stonewall Inn, a resistance movement that had loudly proclaimed ‘Gay Pride’ was born. The year before, James Brown had urged African Americans to “say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud.” Ever since, activists and scholars in these movements have welcomed the community-building that social formations rooted in pride have fostered, while, at the same time, backlash against the increased visibility of such disenfranchised groups has appropriated this terminology as well, for instance in the supremacist slogans ‘white pride’ or ‘straight pride.’

Whereas traditional understandings of US patriotism underscore the importance of taking pride in being an American, a Gallup poll from July 2019 stated that Americans’ “pride in the U.S. has hit its lowest point since [the] first measurement,” speaking instead to a feeling of shame. Do pride and shame thus work as opposite ends on the same continuum—or is their relationship more complicated, as queer theorizations of shame might suggest? How do emotions and affect shape these individual feelings and how are they culturally mediated? Through which processes are pride and shame socially constructed, and what cultural work gets activated through them?

For its thirteenth issue, aspeers dedicates its topical section to “Pride and Shame in America” and invites European graduate students to critically and analytically explore American literature, (popular) culture, society, history, politics, and media through the lens of pride and shame in the US. We welcome papers from all disciplines, methodologies, and approaches comprising American studies (and related fields). Potential paper topics could cover (but are not limited to):

Representations or proclamations of pride or shame in literature and (popular) culture, e.g. about different understandings of what constitutes an identity to be proud of (e.g., immigrants or veterans)

Historical events and movements fostered by understandings of pride, political identities forged around it, or community-building enabled by it—or, conversely, parts of the history of the US that have engendered feelings of shame

The commercialization of pride (e.g., ‘pinkwashing,’ ‘pink capitalism’)

The commodification of group identities, e.g. in terms of how TV shows or films portray these movements (e.g., via redefinitions and revisions in cultural representations)

Alternative concepts to ‘pride’ or ‘shame’ as social formations that may complicate these understandings

aspeers, the first and currently only graduate-level peer-reviewed journal of European American studies, encourages fellow MA students from all fields to reflect on the diverse meanings of “Pride and Shame in America.” We welcome term papers, excerpts from theses, or papers specifically written for the thirteenth issue of aspeers by October 27, 2019. If you are seeking to publish work beyond this topic, please refer to our general Call for Papers. Please consult our submission guidelines and find some additional tips at http://www.aspeers.com/2020.

11.07.18: aspeers Call for Papers by American Studies Students at European Universities by 28 October 2018
aspeers: emerging voices in american studies

1) General Call for Papers

For the general section of its twelfth issue, aspeers seeks outstanding academic writing demonstrating the excellence of graduate scholarship, the range of concerns scrutinized in the field of American studies, and the diversity of perspectives employed. We thus explicitly invite revised versions of term papers or chapters from theses written by students of European Master (and equivalent) programs. For this section, there are no topical limitations. Contributions should be up to 7,500 words (including abstract and list of works cited). The submission deadline is October 28, 2018.

2) Topical Call for Papers on “American Anger”

“If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention”—according to an Esquire/NBC News survey from 2016, “[h]alf of all Americans are angrier today than they were a year ago.” Statements like this mirror a perceived cultural and societal change that transcends simplistic partisan divides and has been accompanied by political battles and heated discourse. Though there has been an increased focus on anger in American public life following the 2016 election season, the mobilization of anger has a history that reaches back much further than current debates might suggest.

While anger is often targeted toward a specific group or specific policies, we want to avoid simple, binary conclusions. Rather, we wish to highlight why this emotion has gained such a prominent space in discussions of American culture and politics. In addition, we aim to go beyond a purely pessimistic outlook and are encouraging contributions that look further into either the positive effects of anger or productive responses to anger. In order to explore the breadth of this concept, it can be particularly helpful to not only focus on the current political situation but also on past and present literary explorations of anger and the manifestations of anger as a cultural practice.

For its twelfth issue, aspeers thus dedicates its topical section to “American Anger” and invites European graduate students to critically and analytically explore American literature, (popular) culture, society, history, politics, and media through the lens of anger in the US. We welcome papers from all fields, methodologies, and approaches comprising American studies as well as inter- and transdisciplinary submissions. Potential paper topics could cover (but are not limited to):

Explorations of anger in literature and in popular culture, e.g. in particular genres such as superhero narratives or protest movies, documentaries, mockumentaries, etc., or in various tones or modes, such as insults, mockeries, or denigrations.

Historical moments that saw a mobilization of anger, such as the anti-Vietnam War movement or the Civil Rights movement, as well as transnational dimensions (such as the transatlantic ‘spillover’) of anger.

The ‘racialized’ narratives of anger—e.g. the trope of the ‘angry black woman’ and the often-evoked image of ‘the angry white man’—as well as inquiries into the gender politics of anger, how anger is ‘gendered’ and how and why women and/or trans and nonbinary people are responding to or experiencing anger.

The economies of creating and circulating anger, e.g. news formats featuring punditry, polemics, etc.

Notions of ‘legitimate’ vs. ‘illegitimate’ anger and whether anger can be addressed in such terms at all.

aspeers, the first and currently only graduate-level peer-reviewed journal of European American studies, encourages fellow MA students from all fields to reflect on the diverse meanings of “American Anger.” We welcome term papers, excerpts from theses, or papers specifically written for the twelfth issue of aspeers by October 28, 2018. If you are seeking to publish work beyond this topic, please refer to our general Call for Papers. Please consult our submission guidelines and find some additional tips at http://www.aspeers.com/2019.

10.25.17: Now out: JTAS’s Special Forum on La Floride française: Florida, France, and the Francophone World
Journal of Transnational American Studies

10.25.17: Check out important new and forthcoming scholarship excerpted in JTAS’s Forward section
Journal of Transnational American Studies

03.05.15: Polish Journal for American Studies
Polish Journal for American Studies

PJAS is a representative selection of recent Polish contributions to American literature and American studies. The 2014 issue includes 14 articles and 12 book reviews.

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