Bøger i New Americanists serien

Explores how photographs have been and are used to construct versions of history and examines how photographic representations of otherness often tell stories about the self. This book exhibits the work of American women; tells their absorbing stories; and discusses representations of North American Indians, African Americans,and the migrant poor.

"This is a significant contribution to the transnational study of the journalistic prose of Jose Marti--Latin America's first modernist poet and architect of Cuban independence from Spain. The essays in this volume expand the meaning of the name 'America.' . . . A useful and stimulating book."--Marta E. Sanchez, University of California, San Diego

With anecdote-peppered discussions ranging from literary texts and movies to the future of higher education and the efficacy of unions, this book entertains as it offers a 21st century account of how and why Americanists at home and abroad do what they do.

Focuses on a series of modern writers who were acutely sensitive to the American web of ideology and utopic vision in order to argue that a pervasive middle-class imaginary is the key to the enigma of class in America.

Bringing two voices into the discussion - Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon - to examine the different ways in which their writings embody, engage, and critique the official narratives generated by US liberal ideology, the author revises important ideas in the debate over individualism and the political theory of liberalism.

Offers fresh ways of thinking about whiteness by exploring its surprisingly ambivalent partnership with heterosexuality. This book examines white-supremacist American texts written and produced between 1852 and 1915 - literary romances, dime novels, religious and scientific tracts, film - and exposes the perverse infrastructure of whiteness.

Examines the formation of postmodern sensibilities and their relationship to varieties of paranoia that have been seen as widespread. This book argues that paranoia on the broadly cultural level is essentially a narrative process in which history and postmodern identity are negotiated simultaneously.

Explores the creation of the Pacific Rim in the American imagination and how the concept has been adapted and resisted in Hawai'i, the Pacific Islands, New Zealand, and Australia. This title draws on theories of postmodernism, transnationality, and post-Marxist geography to contribute to the discussion of what constitutes 'global' and 'local'.

Examines constructions of racial identity through the exploration of passing narratives including forties jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow's memoir Really the Blues

During the 1992 Democratic Convention and again while delivering Harvard University's commencement address two years later, Vice President Al Gore shared with his audience a story that showed the effect of sentiment in his life.

Examines three authors who have influenced the formation of racial identities in the United States: Henry James, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison. Using their work, this title illuminates the significance that representational practice has had in the process of racial construction.

Presents the Harlem Renaissance, exploring early challenges to the idea that race is a static category. Drawing on vernacular theories of African American literature from figures such as Henry Louis Gates Jr and Houston Baker, this book looks at the work of four fiction writers: James Johnson, Nella Larsen, George Schuyler, and Jean Toomer.

Examines the connection between American pragmatism and literary modernism by focusing on the concept of transition as a theme common to both movements. This book illuminates the poetic imperatives of pragmatism by tracing the ways in which Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens capture the moment of transition.

Offers a revaluation of American literature and culture at the dawn of the twentieth century, and provides a context for understanding debates about America's relation to the rest of the world. Ranging over history, politics, philosophy, and literature, this work contributes to debates about utopian thought, globalisation, and American literature.

Published in 1994, this is a paperback edition edition of a study of the life and writings of literary pioneer, Lydia Maria Child. Her writing made and impact on American life as she addressed the issues of her time: slavery, women's rights, treatm

Offers a vision of Henry James as a social critic whose later works can be read as rich with homo-erotic suggestiveness. Drawing from work in queer and feminist theory, this book argues that the most fruitful approach to James is one that ignores the elitist portrait of the formalist master.

Explores interactions between novels and advertising in the construction of subjectivity in the early part of the twentieth century.

Although in recent years scholars have explored the cultural construction of masculinity, the ways in which masculinity intersects with other categories of identity, particularly those of race and ethnicity, have largely been ignored. This title includes essays that address this concern and focus on the social construction of masculinity.

When Jack London died in 1916, he was one of the most famous writers of his time. This book analyses the nature of his appeal by examining how the struggling young writer sought to promote himself in his early work as a sympathetic, romantic man of letters whose charismatic masculinity could carry more significance than his words themselves.

Suitable for students and scholars working in the areas of race, gender, and identity theory, as well as US history and literature, this book offers a perspective for studying the construction and meaning of personal and cultural identities.

A biography of Henry Roe Cloud (c. 1884-1950), a Winnebago educator, scholar, and minister who was one of the most renowned Native Americans of his time.

Reveals how late nineteenth-century Latino migrant writers developed a prescient critique of US imperialism: a critique that prefigures many of the concerns - about empire, race, and postcolonial subjectivity - animating American studies.

Focuses on US citizens' democratic impulse: their ability to imagine and to work with others to create democratic publics while taking divergent views into account. This book contends that citizens of the early US were encouraged to locate this social impulse not in associations with others but in the turbulent interiors of their own bodies.

Documents the contributions of Native Americans to the notion of American nationhood and to concepts of American identity at a crucial, defining time in US history. This book examines the rhetoric and writings of nineteenth-century Native Americans, including William Apess, Black Hawk, George Copway, John Rollin Ridge, and Sarah Winnemucca.

Studies the stirring literature of "Red Power," an era of Native American organizing that began in 1969 and expanded into the 1970s. This title shows instead that the movement engaged historical memory and oral tradition to produce more enabling knowledge of American Indian lives and possibilities.

National narratives create imaginary relations within imagined communities called national peoples. But in the American narrative, alongside the nexus of belonging established for the national community, the national narrative has represented other peoples (women, blacks, "foreigners", the homeless) from whom the property of nationness has been removed altogether and upon whose differences from them the national people depended for the construction of their norms. Dismantling this opposition has become the task of post-national (Post-Americanist) narratives, bent on changing the assumptions that found the "national identity." This volume, originally published as a special issue of bounrary 2, focuses on the process of assembling and dismantling the American national narrative(s), sketching its inception and demolition. The contributors examine various cultural, political, and historical sources--colonial literature, mass movements, epidemics of disease, mass spectacle, transnational corporations, super-weapons, popular magazines, literary texts--out of which this narrative was constructed, and propose different understandings of nationality and identity following in its wake. Contributors. Jonathan Arac, Lauren Berlant, Robert J. Corber, Elizabeth Freeman, Kathryn V. Lingberg, Jack Matthews, Alan Nadel, Patrick O''Donnell, Daniel O''Hara, Donald E. Pease, Ross Posnock, John Carlos Rowe, Rob Wilson

Explores the relation between nineteenth-century American interest in ancient Egypt in architecture, literature, and science, and the ways Egypt was deployed by advocates for slavery and by African American writers.

Poet, novelist, journalist, and ethnographer, Americo Paredes (1915-1995) was a pioneering figure in Mexican-American border studies and a founder of Chicano studies. This book establishes Paredes' pre-eminent place in writing the contested cultural history of the American southwestern borderlands.

Throughout the era of the Cold War a consensus reigned as to what constituted the great works of American literature. Yet as scholars have increasingly shown, and as this volume unmistakably demonstrates, that consensus was built upon the repression of the voices and historical contexts of subordinated social groups as well as literary works themselves, works both outside and within the traditional canon. This book is an effort to recover those lost voices. Engaging New Historicist, neo-Marxist, poststructuralist, and other literary practices, this volume marks important shifts in the organizing principles and self-understanding of the field of American Studies. Originally published as a special issue of boundary 2, the essays gathered here discuss writers as diverse as Kate Chopin, Frederick Douglass, Emerson, Melville, W. D. Howells, Henry James, W. E. B. DuBois, and Mark Twain, plus the historical figure John Brown. Two major sections devoted to the theory of romance and to cultural-historical analyses emphasize the political perspective of "New Americanist" literary and cultural study.Contributors. William E. Cain, Wai-chee Dimock, Howard Horwitz, Gregory S. Jay, Steven Mailloux, John McWilliams, Susan Mizruchi, Donald E. Pease, Ivy Schweitzer, Priscilla Wald, Michael Warner, Robert Weimann

Alan Nadel provides a unique analysis of the rise of American postmodernism by viewing it as a breakdown in Cold War cultural narratives of containment. These narratives, which embodied an American postwar foreign policy charged with checking the spread of Communism, also operated, Nadel argues, within a wide spectrum of cultural life in the United States to contain atomic secrets, sexual license, gender roles, nuclear energy, and artistic expression. Because these narratives were deployed in films, books, and magazines at a time when American culture was for the first time able to dominate global entertainment and capitalize on global production, containment became one of the most widely disseminated and highly privileged national narratives in history.Examining a broad sweep of American culture, from the work of George Kennan to Playboy Magazine, from the movies of Doris Day and Walt Disney to those of Cecil B. DeMille and Alfred Hitchcock, from James Bond to Holden Caulfield, Nadel discloses the remarkable pervasiveness of the containment narrative. Drawing subtly on insights provided by contemporary theorists, including Baudrillard, Foucault, Jameson, Sedgwick, Certeau, and Hayden White, he situates the rhetoric of the Cold War within a gendered narrative powered by the unspoken potency of the atom. He then traces the breakdown of this discourse of containment through such events as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, and ties its collapse to the onset of American postmodernism, typified by works such as Catch–22 and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. An important work of cultural criticism, Containment Culture links atomic power with postmodernism and postwar politics, and shows how a multifarious national policy can become part of a nation’s cultural agenda and a source of meaning for its citizenry.