Founded In    1983
Published   semiannually
Language(s)   English
     

Fields of Interest

 

history, literature, culture, political science, education

     
ISSN   1433-5239
     
Editorial Board

Prof. Dr. Hans-Jürgen Grabbe, artin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg
Dr. Martina Kohl, U.S. Embassy-Berlin
PD Dr. Maria Moss, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg
Prof. Dr. Torben Schmidt, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg

Submission Guidelines and Editorial Policies

Detailed submission guidelines are available here.
Articles should comprise around 3,000 to 5,000 words.
Please submit an electronic version of your manuscript as an e-mail attachment to editors@asjournal.org

     
Mailing Address
     

c/o Institute of English Studies
Leuphana Universität Lüneburg
Scharnhorststr. 1
21335 Lüneburg
Germany
Web http://www.asjournal.org
Email editors@asjournal.org

American Studies Journal

The American Studies Journal is a peer-reviewed open-access journal that provides a forum for intellectual debate about all aspects of social, cultural, and political life in the United States of America. It aims to present new and challenging research in the humanities to both academic and a non-academic audiences around the world.

Three elements make up the asjournal.org web presence: the American Studies Journal with its offerings of scholarly and methodological content, the ASJ Occasional Papers series as a web space for topics that do not fit into the thematically focused issues of the journal, and the American Studies Blog with its topical observations and comments on present-day U.S. society and culture.

 

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Urban Cultures, Urban Landscapes: Growing Up in the American City, No. 54

Introduction


Issue 54 of the American Studies Journal explores a topic particularly interesting for teachers and students of American Studies: What is it like to grow up in urban spaces in the U.S.? Teaching "the city" is a common topic in the EFL classroom, and "youth culture" another. But both are difficult to tackle. There is always the danger of misrepresenting a topic so vast, creating stereotypes rather than questioning them and establishing a limited view on the subject.

The Green/Sustainability Movement, Food Culture, and the Music Scene within Youth Culture in Portland, Oregon


This paper was written after a presentation at the American Embassy's 2009 conference in Bonn for teachers of English and American Studies at German High Schools. Its aim is to offer these teachers a look at how young people (in their 20s and 30s) in the author's home town of Portland, Oregon, are participating in three areas which improve community life: the green/sustainability movement, food culture, and the music scene.

Conscious Hip-Hop, Change, and the Obama Era


This article identifies a particular aspect of hip-hop's range of cultural production -- conscious rap -- in order to isolate one of the more politicized discursive options available to youth in America and a site where critical perspectives on post-Civil Rights America have emerged most forcefully. It further suggests that Obama's political rise corresponds with a new phase in hip-hop and has impacted the ways in which its creative artists frame and articulate issues of race, class, and identity.

Race and Place: Hollywood’s Vision of Urban Youth in Los Angeles Film


This paper examines films about youth of the late 1980s and 1990s in Los Angeles. While focusing on the analytical categories of space and race, the paper underscores the importance of historicizing and contextualizing the genre. Thus, it stresses the significance of successive waves of different ethnic immigration and argues that these created distinct enclaves, many of them internally homogenous in terms of race and class. The distinct enclaves both prepared the ground for the formation of the polynucleated and decentered modern megalopolis and influenced Hollywood's vision of urban youth.

Growing up in New York City: A Generational Memoir (1941-1960)


If historians tend to proceed from external data to hidden motivation of key players, the personal essayist typically moves from the intimate level to the plane of sociology, politics, and history. He becomes, therefore, a generational memoirist. In this autobiographical essay, Howard R. Wolf seeks to become a generational memoirist of New York City.

Teaching "Urban Cultures, Urban Landscapes: Growing Up in the American City": Further Readings and Links


Other Issues

The Deleuze Effect, 30
New Ways of Teaching English: The U.S. Embassy Election Project, No. 58
Transfrontera: Transnational Perspectives on the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, No. 57
The South in the Age of Obama, No. 56
Women's Voices from the House of Time, No. 55
Lincoln's Legacy: Nation Building, Democracy, and the Question of Race and Civil Rights, No. 53
Arab-American Literature and Culture, No. 52