Comparative American Studies An International Journal最新文献

{"title":"Teaching transnational Morrison: curation and comparative American studies","authors":"H. Emmett","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2022.2071069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2022.2071069","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article is the edited text of a talk given in May 2021 for the AHRC-funded Black Female Intellectuals network. It argues that through comparative, transnational work American Studies scholars can widen the definition of who is considered a Black Female Intellectual first in terms of what we understand to be public intellectual work and also in terms of who American Studies scholars recognise as Black. I explore the act of curation as an act of public intellectualism by looking closely at exhibitions curated by African American writer Toni Morrison and Aboriginal Australian artist Fiona Foley. I then discuss Foley’s work as a ‘Blak’ Female Intellectual and argue that as such, her work should be engaged with and taught within transnational, comparative American Studies classrooms.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120855691","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gwendolyn Bennett and Juanita Harrison: Writing the Black Radical Tradition","authors":"O. Walsh, Kate Dossett","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2022.2026207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2022.2026207","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Narratives of radicalism privilege the intellectual thought of men whose ideas are preserved through publication and archives. Black women thinkers are often presumed to be missing from the archive. When they are present, their work is harder to find – often scattered across institutions whose archival practices fail to recognise Black female agency. Black feminist scholars such as Darlene Clark Hine and Saidiya Hartman have created new frameworks to map the unknowable, to reclaim and make visible that which has been withheld, without re-enacting the violence of the archive. This essay considers these issues by exploring the presence of Black women in archives of radicalism in the early twentieth century. It focuses on the public life and writings of Juanita Harrison, whose travelogue was a bestseller in 1936, and the archive of Gwendolyn Bennett, artist and writer who was at the centre of cultural networks in and beyond the Harlem Renaissance. Considering the two together, this article explores how both women attempted to control what was included and what was left out in their public writings and archives, and how this has been shaped by archives of surveillance that privilege the ‘doing’ rather than ‘thinking’ of radical Black women.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123874709","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Lifting the veil on Mary McLeod Bethune’s contribution to American historiography: the first African American woman in the statuary hall collection in Washington D.C","authors":"Fatma Ramdani","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2022.2031585","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2022.2031585","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This chapter seeks to complete the historiography on the hitherto unacknowledged dimension of Bethune’s intellectual endeavours and contribution to American history and culture. It will interrogate Bethune’s contribution to a more racialised and gendered narrative of American history which exemplifies the resistance and agency of her practice of history. Her exceptional trajectory will demonstrate how her marginal situation both in society and in the scholarly field of history proved inspirational in terms of civil rights activism and historical consciousness. Her pragmatic vision of history pushed her to use an arsenal of innovative methods and sources, such as the Black Women’s Archives Project, first hand testimonies of African American women’s lives, that would shape scholarly interpretation of Black women’s history. She broadened the scope of both American and Black history by focusing on a more inclusive narrative from her black feminist perspective. Bethune’s entrance into the Statuary Hall in 2022 – she will become the first African American woman to be honoured in the U.S. Capitol building – marks a long-overdue recognition of a prominent female African American figure and a historian who launched and popularised African American women’s history.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125811852","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"‘Don’t wait for permission’: Ava DuVernay as a Black female intellectual and political artist","authors":"T. Hagan","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2022.2029332","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2022.2029332","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Black intellectualism, particularly in the public sphere, tends to be associated with male figures from the academy. This trend risks excluding a broader range of viewpoints and traditions – particularly the contributions of Black women, artists and community organisers whose intellectual praxis has been wrought from experiences outside the academic paradigm. This article argues that filmmaker and activist Ava DuVernay should be recognised as a Black female public intellectual. It demonstrates how DuVernay uses her work to grapple with the racial histories, philosophies and ideologies which have permeated American history and society. An artist-intellectual-activist, DuVernay sits in a historical lineage of Black artists employing visual cultures to interrogate and resist the operation of racism in the United States. Her work centres and explores Black lives, particularly women, rendering Black characters as complex and multifarious – an act of intellectual rebellion against a hegemonic narrative that centres whiteness, a narrative which has long dominated mainstream film. Through intellectual labour adjacent to her filmmaking, DuVernay also works to promote the perspectives of women and people of colour as interventions in the national imaginary. Ava DuVernay’s work and approach demonstrate that a multiplicity of intellectual identities exist beyond the academy.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131330854","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Black women’s complicated laughter and Toni Morrison’s post-migration novels","authors":"T. Roynon","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2021.2013068","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2021.2013068","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Toni Morrison is not conventionally viewed as a humourist or comic novelist; her chosen subject-matter has inevitably led critics to explore the bleak, tragic and painful dimensions of her writing.Her deployment of both comic anger and of the absurd dimensions of black American history, however, has yet to be properly recognised. This article does not seek to demonstrate Morrison’s place within the tradition of African American women’s politicised humour, however rightful and obscured that place may be. My analysis here instead builds on the general idea that black humour has serious concerns to examine one very specific phenomenon: that of Morrison as a theorist of laughter. In an unprecedented reading, I argue that Morrison’s fiction contains within it a sustained and sophisticated consideration of the act of laughter, the sound of laughter, the look of laughter, and the power of laughter. I am interested in the aesthetic and political dimensions of Morrison’s representation of laugher itself – in her descriptions of not just why but how characters laugh, and of her detailed attention to the variously transformative effects of the act of laughing. Acknowledging this author’s preoccupation with the seriousness of laughter is key to understanding her work, her position within twentieth/twenty-first century black American cultural production, and the complex nature of her intellectual legacy. After tracing a neglected genealogy of black women’s laughter through the Harlem Renaissance and beyond, my exploration focuses on the three ‘post-migration novels’.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117163241","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: Black Female Intellectuals in Historical and Contemporary Context","authors":"Rebecca J. Fraser, Imaobong D. Umoren","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2022.2054585","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2022.2054585","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue of Comparative American Studies, Black Female Intellectuals in Historical and Contemporary Context, developed as part of an AHRC-funded network project over the past three years. This issue draws together several new and innovative essays that add to the field of intellectual histories, importantly expanding on understandings of Black female intellectuals as a discrete and distinct cohort within the wider terms of both ‘Black intellectuals’ and ‘the intellectual’. Importantly, the collection fosters understandings of Black female intellectuals and their actions as both activism (doing) and thought (thinking). Since the earliest years of the transatlantic slave trade in the mid-16th century, women across the Black diaspora have been central to the development of intellectual communities. These have often been grounded in ideals of activism and resistance against racial stereotyping and reductive categories of thought. Yet, the history of the Black intellectual, as defined by previous scholars such as Wilson Moses (2004) and Manning Marable (1998), has presented a somewhat limited interpretation of who might count under this term. Understandings of the Black intellectual in the minds of a non-specialist audience has been largely shaped by previous scholarly understandings of the Black intellectual as typically gendered as male, contributing to regional or national public discourses of the United States, beginning from the early 20th century, through speeches, lectures, and essays. Some excellent scholarship has been published since the late 1980s critiquing this centring of the Black male, and reflecting on Black women’s participation in the intellectual communities of the Black Atlantic (see, e.g. Carby 1987; Peterson 1995; Taylor 2002; Waters and Conaway 2007; Davies 2008; Jones; Bay 2010; Zackodnik, 2011; Bay et al. 2015; Umoren 2018; Blain 2021, 2018; Brooks 2021). Scholars have also begun revisiting the term ‘intellectual’ and widening it out to include activities at a more local level so to include Black women within this conceptual framework (see, e.g. Higginbotham 1993; Dodson 2002; Waters and Conaway 2007; Fraser 2018; Fraser and Griffin 2020). This conceptual broadening of the term as regards what the intellectual does and where she does it from will form one of the central themes of this special issue.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114663575","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reading Evangeline and What Is Left the Daughter: Tracing American Projections of Grief onto Atlantic Canada","authors":"J. Andrews","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2021.2008749","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2021.2008749","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT How do the experiences of the grieving body and the rituals of private and public mourning as depicted in two American-authored texts – Evangeline, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1847 epic poem about the Acadian deportation from Grand Pré in what became Nova Scotia, Canada, and What Is Left the Daughter, Howard Norman’s 2011 novel also set in Nova Scotia – complicate and potentially undermine America’s desire to create ‘a selectively transnational sense of modernity’ or ‘synchronicity across borders’ with one of its closest neighbours, Canada (Luciano 11)? A close reading of these works demonstrates how the bodily grief exhibited by the female protagonists in each one offers a means of exploring Atlantic Canada as a place from which to contest the limitations of American progress, while conversely cautioning against the assumption that Atlantic Canada, whether pre- or post-Confederation, is any more inclusive than the United States.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129392179","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Antebellum America for German Immigrants: Thérèse Robinson von Jacob and Talvi‘s The Exiles (1853)","authors":"J. Ryan","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2022.2036562","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2022.2036562","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The career of German writer Talvi (Thérèse Albertine Luise von Jacob Robinson [1797–1870]) illustrates her strong engagement with the intellectual and elite literary scenes of nineteenth-century Europe and America. This essay reviews her family background and early literary activities in Europe, while noting her extraordinary career as a language scholar, novelist, poet, translator, ethnologist and historian. Written during a period before the development of strong immigration laws in the United States, her complex novel Die Auswanderer (1852)– published in English translation as The Exiles (1853) – voices concerns relevant to both immigrants and American citizens alike, while providing strong views on issues such as slavery, immigration, cultural variation across American states and comparative national identities. The Exiles stands out as both an important early immigration novel and a notable example of German perspectives on the antebellum American social scene.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130089811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Revisiting ‘Falling Man’ at 20: the 9/11 Archive and Missing Images of Jumpers","authors":"J. Gee","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2021.1990642","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2021.1990642","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Images of jumpers represent an emotionally charged symbol of 9/11, yet just after 9/11 their circulation was quickly and dramatically censored. Yet twenty years later, the 9/11 archive continues to be curated in this way. As the 9/11 archive particularly supports the justification of many military tactics and international interventions, it becomes important to look at what has been excluded and why, including photographs and video. This paper will turn to representations of jumpers in three forms – in photography, in literature, and in film. It will address Richard Drew’s famous ‘Falling Man’ photo, literary representations of the photo in Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man, and film of jumpers in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s short film from the collection 11ʹ09”01: September 11th. This article thinks through how narratives surrounding jumpers serve to maintain governmental support for international intervention, while very few representations seek to propel another story.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"138 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117049467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cuban Music, Global Screen: Hypervisibility, Identity Politics, and Resistance in Seidy ‘La Niña’ Carrera’s Tumbao","authors":"Ellen Rebecca Bishell","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2021.1947109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2021.1947109","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Music can serve as an important vehicle for making political statements, cohering community and forming solidarity at the intersections of identity, and exposing structures of inequality linked to (post)colonially informed power hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality. However, intensified global flows of images and capital in a time of digital dominance have reconfigured existing notions of musical ‘protest’. Through a systemic functional-multimodal approach to the music video for Cuban American artist Seidy ‘La Niña’ Carrera’s Tumbao, this article argues that the politics of identity in music video are often rather compromised to offer certain kinds of precarious resistance. The tensions between the political and the creative-commercial in Seidy’s interpellation as a foreign-but-familiar, national/diasporic-but-exotic mulata cubana evince the ambivalence of claims to protest when they become hypervisible on a ‘global screen.’ A hypervisible figure must market themselves in certain ways; any kind of political intervention must be carefully balanced and constantly negotiated. Ultimately, this article highlights a new identity politics of hypervisibility that is inextricably tied to music as a form of resistance in an age of streaming and video-sharing.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115002768","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}