American Studies Commons^™

Lynching The White Imagination: Changing The Dynamics Of Lynching And Rewriting The Cult Of True Womanhood In Grimke, Johnson, And Terrell, Melissa L. Antonucci

English Theses & Dissertations

Despite critics'ack and forth argument over the merits, or lack thereof, of a uniquely black theatre experience, black women playwrights, much like their male counterparts, were once wholly invisible to the white community. But what makes their invisibility unique is their absence in the black world and in literary scholarship. Unfortunately, modern scholarship has oftentimes dismissed these exceptionally powerful plays, cataloging them as poorly written and lacking stylistic and formal elements. It was only recently that they were included in a highly male-dominated history of African American theatre and art. The question of their use of sentimentality, however, remains unanswered. …

Guillermo Gómez-Peña's "Tekno Poética" Web Verse, Lost And Found In A Webspora, Angélica Huízar

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

For an author who likes to cross borders Guillermo Gómez-Peña (1955) has certainly reached audiences in both the U.S. and Mexican artistic, literary, theoretical, and political arenas. Now, with the advent of more technological mediums such as the Internet, the borderless artist makes use of the global fetish that, in theory, reaches a global community. As a prelude to his performances, workshops, conferences and lectures, Gómez-Peña’s collaborative webiste engages his readers in video-poetic selections, and hypertext poetic medley with topics that are sure to catch their interest with poems such as "Apocalypse," "Sexo," "Militias," and the video-poems "Apocalypse" and "Califas." …

American Fantasies Of Masculine, Physical Labor And The Dangerous Bodies Of Pacific Island Whalemen In Roger Starbuck's The Golden Harpoon And Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Jennifer Schell

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Throughout the nineteenth-century, writers, such as James Fenimore Cooper and Joseph C. Hart, fairly consistently appropriated the New England whaling industry for national purposes. They claimed the economic successes of the industry as American successes, and they positioned the whalemen as exemplary American workers. However, not all American whalemen were native-born Americans; some were foreign-born laborers. The presence of Polynesian workers and their racialized laboring bodies - often described as monstrous, grotesque, and repulsive - disrupted nationalistic appropriations of the whaling industry and its workers. What was so dangerous about these men was not just that were reputed to be …

Review Of Cursed From Birth: The Short, Unhappy Life Of William S. Burroughs Jr., By William S. Burroughs, Jr., Alan Clinton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

William S. Burroughs Jr. was the son of the author of Naked Lunch and Joan Vollmer, whom his father accidentally (at least consciously speaking) shot in a "William Tell act" in Mexico City. He was also, in his own words, "the author of two novels [Speed and Kentucky Ham] published in seven languages, and numerous articles in national magazines." The title of this latest incarnation from Soft Skull Press casts Burroughs Jr. in the tradition of the poètes maudites and, interestingly, in relation to a short story by Ernest Hemingway about a woman who "accidentally" shoots …

Threatening Bodies Resisting Containment: Enemy Combatants, War Protestors And Same-Sex Couples, Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo, Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

The U.S.-launched "War on Terror" has been a major driving force in political discourses during the last few years, including presidential discourse. Since September 11, 2001, presidential rhetoric has systematically entangled international efforts, such as "the War on Terror" and the War in Iraq, with domestic issues, such as same-sex marriages and civil unions. In so doing, international and domestic threats have been effectively merged into one, and in the process, specific bodies have been constructed as "terrorist" agents in need of strict containment (for example, enemy combatant bodies, war protestor bodies, and the bodies of same-sex couples). This paper …

Review Of Dripping Dry: Literature, Politics, And Water In The Desert Southwest, By David N. Cassuto, Cory Shaman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Concentrating primarily on the environmental history of the last 100 years in the American Southwest, David N. Cassuto examines what he suggests is the nexus of political dispute regarding water in the region: the intractable tension between the ideologies of reclamation and restoration. After an initial chapter on John Wesley Powell and the 19th century origins of the hydraulic West, the book proceeds with an exploration of four representative texts in order to demonstrate what Cassuto has identified as the successive stages of the reclamation movement: "At the beginning of the twentieth century, Mary Austin believed in spite …

Literal/Littoral Crossings: Re-Articulating Hope Atherton’S Story After Susan Howe’S Articulation Of Sound Forms In Time, W. Scott Howard

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Water transforms everything it touches: landscapes, lives & languages. This essay offers a true relation, or a sequence of contiguous reflections—some concentric, others eccentric—provoked by the strange story of Hope Atherton (1646-77), first minister of Hatfield, Massachusetts and protagonist of American poet Susan Howe’s Articulation of Sound Forms in Time (Awede, 1987): his involvement at the battle of Peskeompscut (May 19, 1676) and separation from Captain Turner’s men during their retreat, which became a rout; Rev. Atherton’s crossings of rivers & brooks, his fearful wanderings through woods, around marshes, swamps; his near captivity, miraculous signal escapes, deliverance from …

On Chris Lehmann's Revolt Of The Masscult, George Ciccariello Maher

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The good folks at Prickly Paradigm are certainly doing their job. Their stated objective is “publishing challenging and sometimes outrageous pamphlets,” and Lehmann's short piece fulfills this claim brilliantly, evoking intellectual mood swings that span from shouting for joy at a particularly lucid formulation to shouting angrily at the deftness with which Lehmann transforms his lucidity into suspiciously wrongheaded and reactionary assessments. The clinical bipolarity of this work, as we will see, is no coincidence: it is precisely the political entanglement of the subject of mass culture (“masscult”) that leads to both respect for one's opponents and suspicion …

A Joint Rolled In Toilet Paper: Funkadelic’S Funky Soul, Joseph T. Thomas Jr.

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Through an examination of Parliament-Funkadelic’s lyrics and music, this paper explores shit, dirt, and the funk, investigating their relationship to George Clinton and his band’s desire to darken the Humanistic project of Enlightenment, their desire to soil language, and thereby question conventional, bourgeois values. The author argues that Funkadelic participate in what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the “peculiar logic” of the carnivalesque, detourning status quo notions of culture and society, creating complex contortions through the blurring of the good and the bad, the cerebral and the carnal, the sublime and the mundane. In essence, Funkadelic are a musical carnival that exists …

"When A Killer Body Isn't Enough": Cross-Gender Identification In Action-Adventure Video Games, Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

While sports games try to recreate the atmosphere of a stadium or of television broadcasts of games, role-playing and action adventure games attempt to duplicate cinematography through animation. For Tomb Raider, the virtual reality created by the cinematic animation of the game produces an environment for male-to-female cross-gender identification, a topic that has received little critical attention. The sense of identification intended in this chapter comes from psychoanalysts Jean Laplanche and Jean-Baptiste Pontalis, who describe identification as a "psychological process in which a subject assimilates an aspect, a property, a characteristic of another and transforms himself [or herself] totally or …

"It'll Pass": Nypd: Blue's Sipowicz And Mundane Masculinity, Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) The development of the character of Det. Andy Sipowicz, on the ABC drama, NYPD: Blue, effectively demonstrates that the obstinance of traditional forms of masculinity may ultimately be a key factor in their undoing. Rather than effecting a superficial change based on consumer choice, as concurrent characters do, Sipowicz undergoes a transformation of his social behavior. Sipowicz regularly behaves in a manner consistent with Robert Connell’s definition of “hegemonic masculinity”: he resorts to violence, he resists change and he resents women and minorities (131). His alcoholism and quick temper tend to hinder his ability to adapt. However, change …

De La Mujer Invisible Al Feminismo Ineludible: Política Y Antropología En La Historiografía De La Mujer, Robert H. Holden

History Faculty Publications

La historiografía de la mujer, desde el comienzo de su etapa contemporánea en los años setenta del siglo pasado, es analizada en dos vertientes relacionadas: Una, su politización al servicio del movimiento social que aboga por la extensión de los derechos de la mujer y que dió luz a dicha historiografía; dos, el papel central que ha jugado la pregunta antropológica, ‘¿Qué es la mujer’?, y la variedad de respuestas que esta pregunta ha generado. El autor sostiene que tanto la intensa politización como el desarrollo de una antropología cada vez más materialista, como tendencias interdependientes, han llegado a caracterizar …

Review Of Fledgling, By Octavia Butler, Michael Dean Benton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

On Justine Larbalestier’S The Battle Of The Sexes In Science Fiction, Joe Bisz

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Science Fiction, writes author Justine Larbalestier, has always told the tale of the battle between the sexes. The battle can be witnessed from afar, as in the grainy 1930’s letter columns in old sci-fi magazines like Astounding where quarrels over innate sexual differences were published and debated, or from up close in today’s literature. Larbalestier declares that the goal of her book is to illustrate how necessary and important this former, pre-70’s period of science fiction (1926 to 1973) is to contemporary feminist science fiction. The pre-70’s time period has been consistently ignored by critics, who fixate on …

Oy Science Fiction: On Genre, Criticism, And Alien Love: An Interview With Marleen S. Barr, Marlene S. Barr, Ximena Gallardo C., C. Jason Smith

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph of Abstract]

Marleen S. Barr is a pioneer of feminist science fiction criticism and a leader in the fight against the ghettoizing influences of genre-labeling in literary criticism. While the noteworthy Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction (University of Iowa Press, 1992) has been praised as Barr's seminal work in feminist science fiction criticism and theory, it is in Genre Fission: A New Discourse Practice for Cultural Studies (U of Iowa P, 2000) where she takes on literary critics' discriminatory practices against genre fiction in general and fantasy and science fiction in particular.

Review Of Mizora: A Prophecy, By Mary E. Bradley Lane, Melissa Purdue

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

On Lillian Robinson’S Wonder Women: Feminisms And Superheroes, Carlos Hernandez

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Sure, we all know that one of the primary functions of comic books is to titillate the proto-patriarchal penises of 12-year-old boys. But might this all-American art form have more to offer women than wedgie-prone bikini bottoms and cleavage from the Planet of the Fembots? According to Lillian Robinson’s Wonder Women, the answer is “Yes, but ....” The “Yes” part comes primarily, and foundationally, through the original Wonder Woman comics of the 40s, which told a story that to this day remains almost unheard-of in comic books: the story of a fully-realized female protagonist. For Robinson, the …

What Have Bagels Got To Do...?, Michael Kula

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

“What Have Bagels Got to Do with Midwesternness?” is a creative nonfiction essay that examines the way my own “exile” from the Midwest has influenced my writing and my self-concept, and how, in turn, my writing has subsequently altered my perspective on the regional label “Midwestern.” Drawing from sources ranging from Charles Baxter to James Baldwin to the 1970’s film, Breaking Away, the essay examines how it is not only the “place” itself that shapes us as writers, but perhaps more importantly, our own filtered view of that “place.”

On Bill V. Mullen's Afro-Orientalism, Graham Barnfield

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

For two decades Edward Said's Orientalism has occupied a significant place in how we think through the cultural relations between what we now call ‘North’ and ‘South’. Conceived in the 1970s, Said’s model mounted a challenge to readers in the west, suggesting they should unlearn what they know of the east. Despite its influence, one weakness of this approach was the underlying suggestion that orientalism was a one-way street, constituting a fixed set of perceptions or timeless discourses. In and without the Orientalist imagination, what is to be done with those in ‘the Occident’ who find themselves treated …

On Bill Brown's A Sense Of Things And Things, Alan Clinton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

If he were not already well-established within the academic world (George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago, co-editor of Critical Inquiry), Bill Brown’s 2003 and 2004 might begin to look like Jacques Derrida’s 1967. A Sense of Things comes equipped with jacket praise from Simon During of Johns Hopkins, Alan Trachtenberg of Yale University, Julia Stern of Northwestern University, and Michael Taussig of Columbia University. Not surprisingly, two of these individuals (in addition to Bill) appear in the edited volume Things, based on a Critical Inquiry special issue devoted to the topic. …

On Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'S Player Piano, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

I always get suspicious when a book I'm looking for is hard to find. If I'm feeling paranoid in a post-Patriot Act sort of way, I imagine vast memory holes being stuffed with the writings of people like George Orwell and Philip K. Dick by legions of aspiring yuppies-- fit, good-looking, and totally uninterested in anything that requires reading. A gaggle of Cheneyesque men do a walkthrough, to make sure that they are destroying our intellectual heritage efficiently, and to remind them all that if they destroy enough knowledge, they might get promoted (even as the suits make …

But Who Is Any Longer Interested In The Possible?: Kathy Acker In Hell Failing Fuck You, Jake Kennedy

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

In 'But who is any longer interested in the possible?': Kathy Acker in Hell Failing Fuck You I explore and celebrate Acker's use of a tropics of failure (plagiarism, pain, terror, gender-play, bad jokes, dumbness) as an inimitable strategy for achieving counter-cultural art and community. The prose style and scholarly apparatus of my article reflect not only my position as a poet/academic but also attempt to model an ethical, non-authoritative, Acker-informed critical language.

The Graveyard Of Genre: David Markson's Postmodern Epitaphs, Camelia Elias

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

David Markson is a writer who in a series of novels entitled Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988), Reader's Block (1996), and This is not a Novel (2001) explores some of our basic conceptions of genre. Can we call a book of fragments a novel? Is a novel still a novel when the characters are given names such as Author, Protagonist, Reader? What are we left with, when critics resort to labels such as novel of intellectual reference and allusion . . . minus the novel, or seminonfictional semifiction to categorise his texts? Through an apparently endless list of anecdotes and facts regarding …

One-Way Street In A Global City: Don Delillo And The Lugubrious Boredom Of The New Economy, Samuel Gerald Collins

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

few of the things we have fought against in cultural studies include the erroneous perceptions that the forces associated with globalization are 1) benefiting the world's peoples and 2) producing a homogeneous global culture. Against this, we have proffered endless texts documenting the sufferings of the world's peoples and critiquing the underlying assumptions regarding U.S. and Western hegemony as well as more hopeful tracts charting a more equitable future as an alternative to crushing regimes of neo-liberalism. In this, we have been joined by countless activists as well as others in women's studies, Latino/a studies, international relations and …

"Fictual" Reportage And (Virtual) Reality: Truman Capote's In Cold Blood And Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, Rania M. Mahmoud

English Theses & Dissertations

This study discusses Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song. using Jean Baudrillard's theory of the four stages of the image and John Hellmann's notion of the transforming power of consciousness. Examining two landmarks of what is widely referred to as the nonfiction novel, or creative nonfiction, the study suggests that any attempt to record reality ends up as fabulation, whereby the writer produces his/her own version of reality. Thus, we have multiple realities or, in other words, fables woven out of the interpretive consciousness of individual writers. Taking this a step further, since all our …

Cyborg Bodies And Digitized Desires: Posthumanity And Phillip K. Dick, Jennifer Attaway

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

The interaction between human beings and intelligent machines has challenged the traditional understanding of what it means to be human. In his novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, phillip k. dick rethinks human identity through the positioning of human beings within a technologically mediated reality that displaces the biological body and the spontaneity of human sensation. Written in 1968, dick's novel anticipates the effect of a technologically mediated culture on the formation of a posthuman identity. dick's fictional juxtaposition of the human being and the organically anthropomorphic android complicates conventional implications of embodiment. Androids are physically …

Probing The Posthuman: Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2 And The Mind-Body Problem, Miranda Campbell

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

In this paper, Miranda Campbell discusses Richard Powers' novel Galatea 2.2 and argues that this work is situated at the intersection of the posthumanist and humanist discourses. Campbell examines Powers' approach to the mind-body problem, his interrogation of the limits and limitations of posthumanism, and its dissolution of the importance of the body, difference, and agency. In the posthuman setting of the Center for Advanced Science of this novel, scientists integrate the mind into the body through its designation as a mechanically functioning brain. At the Center, the binary of human and machine begins to erode with the …

The Infinite Plasticity Of The Digital: Posthuman Possibilities, Embodiment And Technology In William Gibson's Interstitial Trilogy, Tama Leaver

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

Ever since William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in his debut novel Neuromancer, his work has been seen by many as a yardstick for postmodern and, more recently, posthuman possibilities. This article critically examines Gibson's second trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties), focusing on the way digital technologies and identity intersect and interact, with particular emphasis on the role of embodiment. Using the work of Donna Haraway, Judith Butler and N. Katherine Hayles, it is argued that while William Gibson's second trilogy is infused with posthuman possibilities, the role of embodiment is …

On Power And Equity: Toward A Working-Class Rhetoric, Omar Schwartz

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The working-class in the United States has been, and continues to be, systematically excluded from normative political representation and is allowed little opportunity to contribute to the terms and conditions of its social existence (Henwood, 1987; Moberg, 1992). While few workers today resist such marginalization, this has not been always the case. During the formative period of U.S. labor consciousness (from the end of the Civil War until the First World War), the political alienation of labor was routinely challenged by workers who relied extensively (and illegally) on collective self-help in their pursuit of economic justice. With this …

On Aaron Baker's Contesting Identities: Sports In American Film And Stephen C. Wood And J. David Pincus's Reel Baseball: Essays And Interviews On The National Pastime, Hollywood And American Culture, Marc Ouellette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Aaron Baker's Contesting Identities: Sports in American Film is an indictment of the key American myth that anyone can succeed through self-reliance. Baker finds that sports films, in general, comprise a site in which the myth is represented and reproduced. Baker's focus, though presented from multiple analytical perspectives, is singular in its purpose. That said, Baker does concentrate on what he considers the four core American sports: football, baseball, basketball and boxing. Approximately ninety movies, from the silent era to the present day, provide the content of the analysis, but several are exemplary and are cited repeatedly in …