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Acoma
Rivista internazionale di studi nordamericani For fourteen years — the first issue was published in the Spring of 1994 — Ácoma (originally published by Giunti Editore, in Florence, and now by Shake Edizioni, in Milano) has characterized itself as an “international journal of North-American Studies“ with a special interest in those social, political, and cultural realities overlooked by commonsensical approaches to the North-American universe. The journal is committed to a rigorous reading and re-reading of texts and narrations, histories and fashions and shuns both unconditional praise and prejudicial hostility towards the U.S. In the issues of Ácoma (named after the oldest inhabited settlement in the United States) we have published so far, readers can find essays on the ethnic literatures of the U.S., on Bruce Springsteen, on the death penalty, on Appalachian culture, on E. A. Poe and Toni Morrison, on current political discourse in the US, on the re-election of George Bush, Jr., on the novels of Henry James, on contemporary poetry, on Philip K. Dick and cyberpunk, on Afro-American women, on Hawaian literature, on Malcolm X, on Paul Auster. We have also interviewed major writers and critics, Sacvan Bercovitch and Sherman Alexie, Leslie Marmon Silko and Paul De Man, and we have also published a vast array of literary texts by Grace Paley, Emily Dickinson, Raymond Carver, and many, many others.
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Winter 2004, Issue 29/30
This issue of Acoma features work by Fabrizio Tonello, Valentina Pasquali, and Paolo Naso, among others.
“Federalismo, distorsione della rappresentanza, integrità delle elezioni”
Federalism, distortion of popular representation, and integrity of the elections.
Turnout went up, "blue" states voted as expected, and "red" states did the same - this are the 2004 general elections in a nutshell. Voter turnout was the highest since 1968 but, contrary to many forecasts, both candidates profited from it, not only John Kerry. Coastal states voted democratic, as did Midwestern industrial states (with the exception of Ohio). Southern and prairie states went to the Republicans, as usual. In the end the map of the presidential vote was the same as in the year 2000, except for New Mexico and Iowa, which shifted to Bush, and New Hampshire, which shifted to Kerry. A Kerry victory would have been a truly extraordinary event: in times of war no incumbent President looking for re-election has ever been defeated in the United States.
Arizona Dreaming: una volontaria italiana alla corte di John Kerry
An Italian Campaigning for John KerryThe author, fresh out of an Italian College, describes the daily duties and emotions of campaigning for John Kerry in Arizona in October 2004.
Il destino dei teocons nel Bush II
The Future of Teo-cons with Bush II
The 2004 Presidential election has been heavily influenced by moral and religious concerns. In the light of this, the article argues that the electoral turnout of evangelical denominations has been especially crucial, as their alignment with the traditional religious right helped bring the election home for the Republicans. This Bush-centered narrative of the self has also fostered the alignment, by engraining George W.'s avowed religious faith in the renewed fundamentalist narrative of the Armageddon, and of the 9/11 disaster. The article, however, points out that the fundamentalist drive is somewhat in contrast with, and poses threats to, Republican national politics; as a consequence it is to be expected that it will be abandoned in the very near future.
Le Hawai’i al di là del mito (e della pubblicità)
Introduction: The Hawai'i beyond myth (and advertising)
This study interrogates the conventional depicting of Hawai'i both as a "tourist paradise" and as the melting pot of the Pacific, by investigating its troubled socio-political and cultural scenario and its colonial inheritance. The representation of Hawai'i, typical of movies and tourist posters, draws upon the Anglo-American cultural tradition, starting with James Cook's voyage in 1778, and serving the needs of colonial propaganda. Today, as the fiftieth US State, Hawai'i experiences US cultural hegemony, which obliterates Native Hawaiians' rights to self-determination, while silencing native and ethnic voices. While the Native Hawaiian Renaissance deconstructs the Anglo-American representations of Hawai'i from the native's viewpoint, the ethnic tradition provides a point of debate over the notion of melting pot and its ideological implications.
“Lovely hula hands”. L’industria del turismo e la prostituzione della cultura hawaiana
"Lovely Hula Hands". Corporate Tourism and the Prostitution of Hawaiian Culture
In this essay, Haunani-Kay Trask adopts prostitution as a model to analyze the operation of corporate tourism in Hawai'i: Hawai'i is the beautiful woman transformed into a prostitute through the selling of its culture, beaches, weather, and people; the tourists are the johns, paying for the pleasurable experience; and the state is the pimp, pandering to the idea of bringing millions more tourists to Hawai'i. The land and natural resources of Hawai'i are appropriated by multinational corporations, whose profits then return to Japan, Hong Kong, Canada,and the United States. The cost of living and housing skyrockets, the increasing demand forwater and services produces pollution, urbanization, and overdevelopment, and local residents become impoverished as they find employment in the low-wage tourism and entertainment industry. In the process, Native peoples are more and more dispossessed, as both their sacred lands and their culture are transformed into mere commodities for the benefit of tourists and the tourist industry.
Ka Ola Hou'Ana o ka 'Ōlelo Hawai'i i ka Ha'i Ana o ka Mo'olelo i Kēia Au Hou: La rinascita della lingua hawaiana nello storytelling hawaiano
Ka Ola Hou 'Ana o ka 'O¯ lelo Hawai'i i ka Ha'i'Ana o ka Mo'olelo i Ke¯ia Au Hou: The revival of the Hawaiian Language in Contemporary Storytelling
This article focuses on the importance of the Hawaiian language and contemporary storytelling. For countless centuries, the stories of the Hawaiian people were passed down through oral tradition. Today, there is a revival of Hawaiian language storytelling in diverse venues on stage which draw their inspiration from the printed page of the 19th century onward, while preserving the traditional oral art form, presenting them in new ways. Because language plays a key role in native cultures, the link between Hawaiian language and culture defines the identity of the Hawaiian people. This essay gives a historical overview of the suppression and revitalization of the Hawaiian language, and its link to contemporary storytelling today, including a brief synopsis on different storytelling events and venues.
Gli spettri e la politica dei luoghi alle Hawai’i
Specters and the Politics of Place
This essay posits that the histories of colonization, settlement, and native resistance lead to competing experiences, goals, and commitments to the telling and valorizing of supernatural legends in present-day Hawai'i. In alternative to the multicultural approach that has characterized the popularizing of "chicken skin tales," Bacchilega suggests that re-framing these tales as "storied places" rather than "localized" legends encourages considering the social struggles and tensions that these everyday narratives - and their histories - silence and/or voice. In the spirit of "re-peopling" Hawai'i as an indigenous place, the essay argues for the significance of a historicizing approach to place and land, rather than localized setting, as analytical tool to mark not only genre but the continuity or re-emergence of a Native Hawaiian epistemology and worldview in the present time.
Il colonialismo stanziale degli asiatici alle Hawai'i e il ruolo dei nazionalismi anticoloniali nativi negli Asian American Studies
Asian settler Colonialism in Hawai'i: Foregrounding Anticolonial Native Nationalism in Asian American Studies
In her essay, Candace Fujikane argues that Asian Americanists must foreground Native nationalisms in Asian American Studies by examining their roles as settlers in the U.S. colonial nation-state. She deals with the anti-nationalist sentiment in Asian American Studies that has grown out of critiques of racist American nationalism and a male-oriented and heteronormative Asian American cultural nationalism. Asian Americanists' anti-nationalist sentiment, however, ends up by opposing indigenous nationalist struggles in the U.S. in ways that stake a settler claim, in the poststructuralist form of an "egalitarian non-belonging" that elides the contemporary struggles of Native peoples. Through a critique of her own work and the recent work of Kandice Chuh, she argues that as Asian Americanists, we must hold ourselves accountable for the ways our settler scholarship undermines Native struggles for self-determination.
Rimescolare l’ibridismo: globalizzazione, resistenza dei nativi e produzione culturale alle Hawai’i
Remixing Hybridity: Globalization, Native Resistance,and Cultural Production in Hawai'i
In order to counter the unproductive binary opposition between what is often called "nativist authenticity" and diasporic or poststructuralist forms of identity and community, this article considers two projects in Hawai'i that depend upon cultural mixings -- Joe Balaz's spoken word CD Electric Laulau and Hapa's cover of the U2 song, In the Name of Love. In our analysis, we work to recognize the important place that they hold within the broadly nationalist and multi-faceted Native Hawaiian sovereignty movement. We are interested in how these projects, as they undo the assumptions on which much hybridity theory rests, show that the celebration of hybridity that characterizes a great deal of postcolonial theory is itself predicated on a reactionary and politically conservative form of essentialism. We argue that discourses of postcolonialism are often complicit in the erasure of indigenous cultural forms and political struggles. Moreover, while we recognize the need to account for the flows of people and cultural forms across national borders, we argue for closer attention in postcolonial studies to indigenous struggles within the U.S. that challenge its geographic borders.
Intervista
An interview with Victor J. Banis
La storia dei neri all'asta: ovvero come Malcolm X divenne una merce nell'America del grande capitale
Black History in the Auction Black: How Malcolm X Became a Commodity in America's Corporate Marketplace
What happened to Malcolm X's intellectual and material legacy within African-American culture in the forty years following his assassination in 1965? The answer, according to Marable, is that the black leader was transformed into an American corporate commodity thus becoming a sort of commercial brand. Tracking the complicated sets of events taking place in the last part of Malcolm's private and public life as well as in those of his large family, and unravelling the complicated plot behind the 2002 pending auction of a remarkable cache of Malcolm X's documents, Marable suggests some different and yet interrelated reasons for the growth of a dangerous speculative market of source materials by or related to Malcolm X. First, the difficulties met by Malcolm's family - shattered by a series of traumatic events - in trying to create a physical site to house a Malcolm X archive; second, the responsibilities of Alex Haley in drawing a rather unreliable portrait of Malcolm's thoughts and actions in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, expressing his own overriding ideological objective instead; and third, as far as the black generation born after the Civil Rights and Black Power is concerned, the failure of Spike Lee's 1992 biopic film "X" in constructing any kind of credible account of Malcolm X's life and the highly commercialised promotion of the film itself.
L’altra faccia della nuova Hollywood: il cinema di Terrence Malik
New Hollywood's other face: the cinema of Terrence Malick
The article interprets Malick's cinema as a submerged line in the New Hollywood aesthetics and industry: instead of taking inspiration from Europeans authors, like other directors of the Seventies, Malick attempts a truly American innovative approach. His movies inherit and continue the great literary, pictorial and photographic modernism(s) of the United States, and by doing this they radically criticize the individualistic culture in Hollywood stories. On the one hand, the effect is reached through the use of the voice over in the style of James or Salinger, on the other hand by introducing into the movies references to photography (or rather, to that particular trend of American photography ranging from Lewis Hine's "human documents" to the war reporting in "Life" Magazine). The photographic references often clarify the meaning of the movies: in Badlands and Days of Heaven the key is the working class and rural iconography; in The Thin Red Line the visual pattern of the Vietnam War reverses the conventional view of the Second World War.
Lo ‘scontro delle civiltà’: visioni critiche dai mondi arabo e islamico
The “Clash of Civilizations”: Readings and Critics from the Arab and Islamic Worlds.
This essay presents the critic views of some scholars, belonging to the Arab and Islamic world, concerning Samuel P. Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis. The essay does not offer a systematic analysis of all possible Arab and Islamic criticisms of the “clash” thesis. Rather, it explores them selectively, with no presumption of being exhaustive. It could not be otherwise. In fact, despite the limitations of the chosen corpus, the essay aims to present a number of direct quotations from different sources and an idea of their cultural-political context. In its own way it is a contribution to the breaking off of that self-referentiality that in Italy has characterized most of the debate concerning the relations of the “West” with the Arab and Islamic worlds.
Women in War: immagini della propaganda americana
Women in War: Images of American Propaganda.
The employment of women during the war period was promoted and sponsored by a massive propaganda campaign. Patriotic pride; the continuity with a heroic past, at times against the background of a female revisitation of the frontier myth; the dream of a “lifetime education” with equal economic treatment and no gender discrimination: these messages are all promoted through the intelligent use of slogans, images, colors, star-and-stripes banners. But if, when the war is over, those jobs are taken back by men and women go back to their housework within the cultural context of the “tranquillized fifties”, it is also true that such experiences outside the domestic environment help deconstruct the dominant images of women as subalterns and stimulate the construction of a new female subjectivity.
Thomas Frank, autore del libro What’s the Matter with Kansas?, discute della destra populista e di come si è fatta abbindolare dai conservatori
An interview with Thomas Frank on his book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?
Tre poesie
Three poems by ku’ualoha ho’omanawanui
Other Issues
Autumn 2008, issue 37
Summer 2008, issue 36
Winter 2008, issue 35
Summer 2007, issue 34
Winter 2007, issue 33
Winter-Spring 2006, issue 32
Winter 2005, issue 31