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Articles 1 - 22 of 22
Full-Text Articles in American Studies
Mixed Feelings: The Emotional Appeals Of Zitkala-Ša’S American Indian Stories, Kayla Joan Baur
Mixed Feelings: The Emotional Appeals Of Zitkala-Ša’S American Indian Stories, Kayla Joan Baur
Publications and Research
Zitkala-Ša (Lakota: Zitkála-Šá, meaning Red Bird) was among the first to write about the experiences of Native American children in the U.S. Indian boarding school program to an English-speaking audience. As a writer and political activist, Zitkala-Ša uses emotional appeals and cultural ideas she learned through her white education to expose the very boarding school institutions that taught her. In American Indian Studies (1921), Zitkala-Ša critiques the violence that the Indian boarding school system inflicts on young Native Americans. She presents these critiques through emotional appeals that take two forms: one, a more traditional sentimental appeal associated with middle-class white …
Romancing The University: Bipoc Scholars In Romance Novels In The 1980s And Now, Jayashree Kamble
Romancing The University: Bipoc Scholars In Romance Novels In The 1980s And Now, Jayashree Kamble
Publications and Research
English-language mass-market romance novels written by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) writers and starring BIPOC protagonists are a small but important group. This article is a comparative analysis of how recent representations of diversity in this sub-set of the genre, specifically the character of the Black academic and the language of racial justice, compare with the first group of BIPOC novels that were published in 1984 (Sandra Kitt’s Adam and Eva and All Good Things as well as Barbara Stephens’s A Toast to Love). In Adrianna Herrera’s American Love Story (2019), Katrina Jackson’s Office Hours (2020), and …
Getting Back: The Chiffons’ Sonic Reclamation, Hilarie Ashton
Getting Back: The Chiffons’ Sonic Reclamation, Hilarie Ashton
Publications and Research
Sixties girl group the Chiffons are famous for their soaring 1964 hit “He’s So Fine,” a song in turn remembered almost as often for its plagiarism by George Harrison than in its own right. Much of the rest of their catalogue, including the tremendous “I Have a Boyfriend,” gets shunted into historical and critical gaps that paint rock music history as controlled by men. In this article, I examine the Chiffons in their own right, reframing a story of well-worn sonic theft to center on the group it obscured, through and alongside interpretative contradictions, assumptions, and historical lacunae. I show …
Ethnic Irony In Melvin B. Tolson's "Dark Symphony", Elizabeth Newton
Ethnic Irony In Melvin B. Tolson's "Dark Symphony", Elizabeth Newton
Publications and Research
This article historicizes musical symbolism in Melvin B. Tolson’s poem “Dark Symphony” (1941). In a time when Black writers and musicians alike were encouraged to aspire to European standards of greatness, Tolson’s Afro-modernist poem establishes an ambivalent critical stance toward the genre in its title. In pursuit of a richer understanding of the poet’s attitude, this article situates the poem within histories of Black music, racial uplift, and white supremacy, exploring the poem’s relation to other media from the Harlem Renaissance. It analyzes the changing language across the poem’s sections and, informed by Houston A. Baker Jr.’s study of “mastery …
Sonic Femininity: The Ronettes' Transgressive Gender Performance, Hilarie Ashton
Sonic Femininity: The Ronettes' Transgressive Gender Performance, Hilarie Ashton
Publications and Research
Iconic sixties girl group the Ronettes are frequently (and justly) celebrated for anchoring the Wall of Sound and inspiring the Beatles, but in their own right, they transgressed social, gendered expectations in revolutionary ways. Framed by a notion I call the sonic feminine, a recuperative theoretical space for the revolutionarily transgressive work of female and femme artists, I argue that the Ronettes, and lead singer Ronnie Spector in particular, enacted a kind of cultural rebellion: they crafted their images to made-up heights that tease the boundaries of drag across the spaces of the stage, the recording studio, the bathroom, and …
“9/11 And The Collapse Of The American Dream: Imbolo Mbue’S Behold The Dreamers”, Elizabeth Toohey
“9/11 And The Collapse Of The American Dream: Imbolo Mbue’S Behold The Dreamers”, Elizabeth Toohey
Publications and Research
Behold the Dreamers follows a Cameroonian couple who, as newcomers to America, harbor dreams of success unavailable to them back home. Undocumented immigration, the widening gulf between rich and poor, and the thinly veiled racism of an avowedly "post-racial" culture converge in this new generation of immigrants' painful encounter with the American dream. I consider the ways Mbue's novel shares themes with a "second wave" of post- 9/11 literature—first, in centering the disillusionment of a protagonist aspiring to the American dream; next, in its representation of New York as a space haunted by 9/11, but also of resistance to the …
Aids And The Distribution Of Crises: Foreword, Preface, And Introduction, Alexandra Juhasz, Nishant Shahani, Jih-Fei Cheng
Aids And The Distribution Of Crises: Foreword, Preface, And Introduction, Alexandra Juhasz, Nishant Shahani, Jih-Fei Cheng
Publications and Research
AIDS and the Distribution of Crises engages with the AIDS pandemic as a network of varied historical, overlapping, and ongoing crises born of global capitalism and colonial, racialized, gendered, and sexual violence. Drawing on their investments in activism, media, anticolonialism, feminism, and queer and trans of color critiques, the scholars, activists, and artists in this volume outline how the neoliberal logic of “crisis” structures how AIDS is aesthetically, institutionally, and politically reproduced and experienced.
The Making And Silencing Of “Axé-Ocracy” In Brazil: Black Women Writers’ Spiritual, Political And Literary Movement In São Paulo, Sarah S. Ohmer
The Making And Silencing Of “Axé-Ocracy” In Brazil: Black Women Writers’ Spiritual, Political And Literary Movement In São Paulo, Sarah S. Ohmer
Publications and Research
In this article, I will focus on two influential writers from the south of Brazil, Cristiane Sobral who currently lives in Brasília, from Rio de Janeiro, and Conceição Evaristo who currently lives in Rio de Janeiro state, from Minas Gerais. I got to know them in São Paulo in 2015 at a public event: the “Afroétnica Flink! Sampa Festival of Black Thought, Literature and Culture.” I will include references to some of their younger contemporaries such as Raquel Almeida, Jenyffer Nascimento, and Elizandra Souza, all of whom reside in São Paulo, in order to illustrate the Black Brazilian women writers’ …
The Evidence Of Things Unseen: Experimental Form As Black Feminist Praxis, Shelly J. Eversley
The Evidence Of Things Unseen: Experimental Form As Black Feminist Praxis, Shelly J. Eversley
Publications and Research
This essay reads Carlene Hatcher Polite's little-known experimental novel Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play and situates it within Black Aesthetics and black feminist theory to argue that experimental forms is crucial to black feminist praxis. The form also exposes critical violences that not only diminish and obscure black feminist writing, but also black women writers.
Loving The Unlovable Body In Lois Ann Yamanaka’S Saturday Night At The Pahala Theatre, Christa Baiada
Loving The Unlovable Body In Lois Ann Yamanaka’S Saturday Night At The Pahala Theatre, Christa Baiada
Publications and Research
Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s award-winning yet remarkably neglected Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (1993) explores female adolescence and coming of age in a rich, polyphonic collection of verse novellas. “Loving the Unlovable Body” focuses on Yamanaka’s treatment of this transition as a fully embodied, fraught, and often painful experience by explicating the uses of several tropes used to express girls’ experiences of their bodies: eating, voice, eyes, fragmentation, and marking/naming. These metaphors contribute to the development of a complex range of possibilities from devastating to hopeful, presented in juxtaposition and interplay, for girls’ relationships to their culturally denigrated bodies and the …
Introduction: The 1970s, Shelly J. Eversley, Michelle Habell-Pallán
Introduction: The 1970s, Shelly J. Eversley, Michelle Habell-Pallán
Publications and Research
Introduction to special issue, "The 1970s," of WSQ (Women's Studies Quarterly), edited by Shelly Eversley and Michelle Habell-Pallán.
Opening Remarks To Outing Lorraine At The Schomburg Center, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz
Opening Remarks To Outing Lorraine At The Schomburg Center, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz
Publications and Research
This article is an edit of the opening remarks for the event held on May 22nd, 2014 at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture as part of the In The Life Series supplying Black LGBT programming coordinated by Steven Fullwood. Outing Lorraine included panelists: Alexis DeVeaux, Joi Gresham, and Steven Fullwood and was moderated by Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz. Opening remarks provide a biographical description of Lorraine Hansberry's life, prepare the audience for a conversation on the implications for "outing" a black iconic figure, details the purpose for use of primary and secondary sources when, and provides a bibliography for …
Italian-American Literature And Working-Class Culture, Fred L. Gardaphé
Italian-American Literature And Working-Class Culture, Fred L. Gardaphé
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.
Conjuring The Close From Afar A Border-Crossing Tale Of Vieques’ Activism And Obama-Empire, Víctor M. Torres-Vélez, Sarah Molinari, Katharine Lawrence
Conjuring The Close From Afar A Border-Crossing Tale Of Vieques’ Activism And Obama-Empire, Víctor M. Torres-Vélez, Sarah Molinari, Katharine Lawrence
Publications and Research
After more than 60 years of military occupation, 30 of these under violent military practices, a social movement forced the U.S. Navy from the island of Vieques. This victory would not have been possible without the highly effective organization of civil disobedience carried out on the island. But the sum total of the actions that eventually forced out the U.S. Navy, neither happened exclusively within the boundaries of Vieques, nor was carried out by Viequense residents alone. In this article we want to suggest that this amazing victory—a testament of people’s will in the face of globalization—is also a border- …
Negrocity: An Interview With Greg Tate, Camille Goodison
Negrocity: An Interview With Greg Tate, Camille Goodison
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.
My Name And My Face, Stuart Ewen
Brown, James, Monica Berger
Brown, James, Monica Berger
Publications and Research
Encyclopedia article on James Brown focusing on his impact on African American history and the Civil Rights movement as well as, to a lesser degree, his impact on the history of music.
Introduction: The Sexual Body, Shelly J. Eversley, Jennifer L. Morgan
Introduction: The Sexual Body, Shelly J. Eversley, Jennifer L. Morgan
Publications and Research
Introduction to the special issue, "The Sexual Body," edited by Shelly Eversley and Jennifer L. Morgan.
Papas' Baby: Impossible Paternity In Going To Meet The Man, Matt Brim
Papas' Baby: Impossible Paternity In Going To Meet The Man, Matt Brim
Publications and Research
"Papas' Baby: Impossible Paternity in Going to Meet the Man" employs the conceit of “impossible” fatherhood to critique mutually reinforcing racist and heteronormative constructions of reproduction. It argues, first, that the white paternal fantasy of creating “pure” white sons is undermined by the homoerotic necessity of bring the phantasmatic black eunuch, castrated yet powerfully potent, into the procreative white bed. The “fact” of the “white” child produced in that marital bed, however, not only cloaks the failure of racial reproduction in the living proof of success but also occludes the male/male union that subtends the heteronormative fantasy of reproduction. …
Female Iconography In Invisible Man, Shelly J. Eversley
Female Iconography In Invisible Man, Shelly J. Eversley
Publications and Research
Argument concerning female visuality in Ralph Ellison's novel, Invisible Man.
Re-Inventing Sicily In Italian-American Writing And Film, Fred L. Gardaphé
Re-Inventing Sicily In Italian-American Writing And Film, Fred L. Gardaphé
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.
The Lunatic's Fancy And The Work Of Art, Shelly J. Eversley
The Lunatic's Fancy And The Work Of Art, Shelly J. Eversley
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.