Digital Commons Network^™

Orientalizing Post/Communism: Europe's 'Wild East' In Literature And Film, Nataša Kovačević

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

The essay posits post/communist Eastern Europe as a neocolonial terrain to show how contemporary discursive underpinnings of global capitalism and liberal democracy have been shaped by a combined Orientalist demonization of communist regimes and Eastern European cultures. It analyzes how old Orientalisms surface in the Cold War period, re-articulated in narratives that define a European or civilizational ideal as an essentially liberal-democratic project against the discursive palimpsest of totalitarian, barbarian, and Oriental communists. The establishment of this discourse has helped to justify transitions to market economy and liberal-civic society in post-communism. These developments increasingly provincialize Eastern Europe through suppressing its …

Shadowy Aesthetics: The Cultural Front, Literary Judgments And Perceptions Of Mass Entertainment, Graham Barnfield

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Michael Denning's The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century was published in late 1996. There are numerous ways of reading its contribution to American cultural studies. Simply put, the book pursued a reading of US cultural history using the "Birmingham School" cultural studies approach developed in Britain in the 1970s to which Denning himself was a contributor. Simultaneously, it sought to recover a home-grown analytical and radical tradition, by looking at the early contributions of loosely analogous intellectual tendencies situated in the US labor movement in the quarter century or so after the …

Introducing 'Class, Culture, And Public Intellectuals': A Special Issue Of Reconstruction, Graham Barnfield, Victor Cohen, Joseph G. Ramsey

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First two paragraphs]

Editing this issue of Reconstruction has become an illustration of the very processes that we set out to discuss and document.

Calling for papers commenced a well-defined project, with all the parameters in place for producing a routine academic work. We knew the Reconstruction editorial collective was keen to do an issue on themes of class. We were also aware of two publication anniversaries in our academic field of U.S. literary radicalism: The New York Intellectuals by Alan Wald in 1987, and The Cultural Front by Michael Denning, about a decade later. Combining a 20th anniversary …

The Dialectics Of Hope: Marxism And Method In The Cultural Front, Charles D. Cunningham

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The tenth anniversary of Michael Denning's The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century is a fitting occasion to revisit a work posing questions that remain fresh today and probably will as long as there is a need to analyze the relationship between dissident cultural movements and a non-egalitarian social order. Encyclopedic in scope, the book is a study of the "cultural production" of the Popular Front of the 1930s and 40s that moves eruditely through a wide range of objects, including proletarian literature, popular music, theater, film, cartoons, and cultural theory. Denning makes …

On Warren Farrell And James P. Sterba's Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men?, Marc Ouellette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Until I began contemplating this review, I had never considered warning my readers about the content of my work despite my specialization and frequent engagement with gender, sex and sexuality. Indeed, I have been an anti-censorship advocate and I have written many times in defence of books that school boards were considering removing. Yet, I cannot cover Warren Farrell's "debate" with Daniel Sterba adequately without revealing the depth of the reductive, offensive and juvenile approach offered in the section written by Farrell and which claims to demonstrate the ways in which feminism discriminates against men. Simply put, how …

Always Passing, Alan Clinton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The essay leading off this issue of Reconstruction, "History, Ethnicity and Religion and the Sudanese North-South Conflict," points out not only the slipperiness of race, but the fact that it is erased and reappears depending on various political contexts. Muslims in Northern Sudan, although claiming an ethnic identity, "are not Arab in a genetic sense." Rather, the goal was to pass as Arab in order to gain status (trade relationships, escape from slavery) with Muslims in the Arabian Peninsula. Yet, what may have begun for many as a pragmatic conversion has in turn passed into an identity claimed …

Contributors, Alan Clinton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about editors and contributors to articles in volume 8, issue 4 of Reconstruction.

Drowning The Past With A Thunderous Shout: Black Culture Workers And Mccarthyism, Paul M. Heideman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Drawing upon a critical deployment of a key Althusserian framework (Repressive State Apparatuses and Ideological State Apparatuses) this essay maps the presence and the repression of different strains of the African-American left between the world wars. Representing jazz musicians – among others – as organic intellectuals is crucial to reconstructing the combination of economic pressures and institutional co-option that shaped their activities and allegiances.

On Ian Tyrrell's Transnational Nation: United States History In Global Perspective, Alexandra Ganser

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

About nine decades after Randolph Bourne's much-cited pamphlet "Trans-National America" was published on the eve of the U.S.'s entry to World War [1], the field of American Studies has recently undergone what has been called a transnational turn. Within this paradigm, the focus of study is increasingly on the transnational exchange of ideas and goods, on border-crossing migrations of people, and on how all of these movements shape (and are shaped by) cultural discourses within and outside the U.S., always in a historically diachronic perspective [2]. Bourne, coining the term "trans-national", started his essay by an analysis of …

Review Of Cultural Globalization: A User's Guide, By J. Macgregor Wise, Samuel Gerald Collins

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

There's no question that Wise's Cultural Globalization is a useful addition to cultural studies pedagogy. In a field dominated by a hand-full of textbooks - Storey's Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, During's Cultural Studies, Hebdige's Subcultures - it's nice to have an alternative for your staid, "introduction to cultural studies" syllabus. And this one is resolutely global, with examples drawn from all over the world, especially East and Southeast Asia, testament to Wise's childhood perambulations.

The Cultural Commons: An Interview With Michael Denning, Victor Cohen

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Michael Denning is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Studies at Yale University. His first two books, Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (Routledge, 1987) and Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture (Verso, 1987), examined the politics of popular fiction. He followed them up with The Cultural Front: Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (Verso, 1998), which has become the encyclopedic study of the culture of the American Popular Front. Denning's most recent work, Culture in an Age of Three Worlds (Verso, 2004), analyses the rise and fall of American …

Reconstructing The 'Humanscape' Of Left Culture And Commitment: An Interview With Alan Wald, Joseph G. Ramsey

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[From Introduction]

Alan Waldis H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor in the Department of English and the Program in American Culture and the University of Michigan. (Note: H. Chandler Davis was a University of Michigan faculty member fired in 1954 and subsequently imprisoned for refusing to co-operate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities.) Renowned among established and emerging scholars of the U.S. literary left for his "encyclopedic" grasp of the field - not just as it stands embodied in published works, but as it lies hidden in private papers, personal correspondence, oral histories, and other subaltern sources scattered throughout the …

Radically American: John Dos Passos, Culture And Politics, Alice Béja

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This essay takes the well-known and near-canonical figure of John Dos Passos, considering his own claims to a form of radicalism independent of political parties and their perceived ideological rigidity. Drawing upon documentary and non-fiction writings, the essay evaluates the writer’s negotiations of radicalism within the constraints of a so-called national political character.

Contributors, Graham Barnfield, Victor Cohen, Joseph G. Ramsey

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 8 issue 1 of Reconstruction.

Theories, Memories, Bodies And Artists, Marc Ouellette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

I suppose it might seem self-assuming to supply an introduction stemming from my own situation when I should be contextualizing the contents of the current crop of essays. Rather than a unifying discourse, though, two class discussions might offer entry points to a disparate collection of otherwise unrelated essays. First, I gave my class an essay assignment which asked them to consider Leon Ferrari's work, Civilisacion Occidentale y Christiana (1965) to see whether or not a contemporary viewer, born after 1986, might find a one or two intertexts in a work of art which features the figure of …

Contributors, Marc Ouellette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 7 issue 4 of Reconstruction.

From Postmodernism To Post-Tradition: The End Of Theory In The Age Of Global Conservatism, Said Graiouid

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This paper explores possible routes of reflecting on non-Western forms of social organization. Taking Morocco as its central site of study, the paper argues that fixed conceptual interpretations cannot provide a constructive understanding of a societal organization in a state of flux. The geographical position of Morocco at the tip of the Mediterranean rim and the country's geopolitical role as a mediator between the West and the Orient create a push and pull social dynamics which has generated conflicts, contradictions but also openings and possibilities. The paper proposes the concept "post-tradition" as a possible theoretical and methodological framework within and …

Contributors, Bennett Huffman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 7 issue 3 of Reconstruction.

Deep Ecology And Postmodernity: Making Space For Conversation, Chris Drinkwater

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Fourth paragraph]

I begin with the fact of ecology's virtual exclusion from cultural studies. Cultural studies are centrally concerned with issues of meaning, subjectivity, objectivity and knowledge. They attempt to describe their production, conditions and complex structural effects. They are particularly interested in effects of inclusion and exclusion: for instance, "What is a legitimate object of attention within a particular discourse?" Why do cultural studies not attend to ecology? Why is negligible attention paid to a discourse and cultural movement, which are so challenging to dominant values and ways of life? I suggest that the omission is not accidental. Cultural …

Review Of Decade Of Disaster, By Ann Larabee, Vibha Arora

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

High-risk technologies cannot prevent, predict, or contain disasters while discourses about such disasters exhibit uncontrolled interpretive possibilities. There is no safe haven, no place that can be free of technological disasters, and such 'unnecessary' violence. What we can plan are escape routes and lifeboats that may rescue us occasionally and fail at other times. Paradoxically lifeboats, radars, containment measures, meters, backup systems cannot shelter all of us from technological risk. Is this the meaning of civilization and human progress? We need to question not merely high-risk technology and its engendered profit but the cultural future premised on such …

Contributors, Alexandra Ganser, Vibha Arora

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 7 issue 2 of Reconstruction.

Introduction, Alexandra Ganser, Vibha Arora

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

At the time of finalizing EcoCultures for publication, nearly all discussions in mass media remind us that climate change has been caused by anthropogenic excesses in the last three centuries. Environmental concern, intertwined with a critical and scholarly perspective, is also at the heart of EcoCultures: Culture Studies and the Environment. The twelve academic articles comprising this issue were written by scholars based in the North and South, speaking different languages yet living in a multicultural global world, and positioned in disciplines ranging from landscape and environmental history, literature and gender studies to visual studies and art. …

Contemporary Art Facing The Earth’S Irreducibility, Amanda Boetzkes

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This article considers the aesthetic strategies and ethical implications of contemporary earth art. Drawing from feminist and ecological phenomenology, I argue that an ethical preoccupation with the earth is identifiable in works that evoke the sensorial plenitude of natural phenomena, but refuse to condense it into a coherent image or art object. By denying a perceptual grasp of the earth, contemporary earth artists question the possibility of representing it as such. They thereby position the earth as a territory of alterity that exists beyond our conceptual and perceptual limits. This approach counters two deeply flawed but nevertheless pervasive stances towards …

Gestures Toward Cross-Species Reciprocal Relations In Contemporary Poetics, Mary Newell

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

In this essay, I explore some embodied bases of ethical attitudes toward human/ animal exchanges in the texts of three contemporary authors: Mary Oliver, Heller Levinson, and Adrienne Rich. Since other species share with humans varieties of agency, sentience, and purposive activity, I suggest that reciprocity is a fundamental aim in cross-species relations. Phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty depicts the correlation between embodied actions and attitudes, for example, between the hand movement of grasping and an appropriative attitude toward the natural world. His concept of reciprocity, grounded in the experience of one hand touching another, provides a reference for encounters that …

Translating Ecocriticism: Dialoguing With Michel Serres, Stephanie Posthumus

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Since its humble beginnings in the Western United States, ecocriticism has grown under the banner of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment into an organization of over 1000 members with international affiliates in Australia-New Zealand, Canada, Europe, India, Japan, Koria and the UK. At first sight, it would seem that ecocriticism has achieved global status. But as Ursula Heise remarks in her assessment of ecocriticism, this process of globalisation has been mainly a process of becoming known internationally. In truth, ecocriticism has remained strongly rooted in Anglophone literary studies even as it has been exported to …

Thinking Like A God: Nature Imagery In Advertising, Catherine M. Roach

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This essay examines selected recent imagery from American advertising that evinces a "negative" sense of nature as hostile other - often portrayed as a persecuting and conquered female - and of humans as its/her master. Examples to be examined of nature as this "Bad Mother" include TV commercials, print advertisements, and a comic strip. I argue that these images spring from a fundamental ambivalence toward nature and that they assuage the anxiety aroused by such ambivalence through a fantasy that casts humans as gods. More specifically, I use the medieval Christian scholastic concept of 'aseity' to suggest that these media …

Reconciling Ethnicity, Subalternity And Chinese Eco-Aesthetics: Human And Animal Subjects In Lu Chuan's Kekexili: Mountain Patrol, Chia-Ju Chang

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

An ecological discourse has not yet arisen in the mainstream of Chinese film studies. Lu Chuan's Kekexili: Mountain Patrol (2004) is the first transnational feature film in China about the endangered Tibetan Antelope. This "eco-thriller" is based on a true event and is about a group of Tibetan volunteers trying to capture the leader of a poaching group who is responsible for mass-slaughtering and skinning the endangered Tibetan Antelope. The film engages a complicated politics of transnational capitalism, ethnicity, animal rights and aesthetics. In this paper, I first survey the history of animal poaching in the Kekexili area and the …

Bird Watching: Global-Natural Worlds And The Popular Reception Of Winged Migration, Lisa Uddin

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This paper examines the contemporary visual cultures of economic globalization and natural history by considering the popular French wildlife film, Winged Migration (dir. Perrin 2001). Through the small-scale of a single film's reception, the paper offers a critique of the Euro-American tendency to conceptualize the global world and the natural world in totalizing and mutually constitutive terms. How have images of a timeless and universal global world become a way of imagining the natural world, and vice versa? How has Winged Migration's circulation amongst an American popular audience reproduced, but also undermined, these joint constructions? Analyzing the film's central theme …

The World Is White And Slow And Infinitely Flat, Rob Baum

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Eco-feminism, cultural study and the environment coalesce in the form of poetic cultural commentary, originally fieldnotes. I draw exclusively from my years in the Alaskan Arctic among the Iñupiat Eskimo, who call themselves "the People of the Whale." The striking and severe natural environment, a landscape of endless ice, is central to the poetry, which richly portrays a vision of the Arctic absent from tourist travel guides, National Geographic and anthropological volumes. These magazines vend the Far North's beautiful austerity, including at times the physical beauty of its animal inhabitants, including humans, while disregarding human specificity and violence …

'Time In A Bottle': Temporal Discontinuities In Narratives Of Diaspora, Emily Churilla

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

The concepts of home have been, and continue to be, the foundation of much of the contention surrounding all sides of discourse regarding diaspora and immigration - through both viewing the home as threatened and defiled as well as redefining the imagined reality of home. It is the impasse of working around and against the frame of Western temporality and space from within the trope of home that this paper will explore; specifically how narratives of diasporic subjectivity disrupt and threaten normalized constructs of origin and time, history, and identity. Because to only consider the question of "home" leaves a …