New American Studies Journal最新文献_第7页

The Ruins of Nostalgia 怀旧的废墟

New American Studies Journal Pub Date : 2022-12-22 DOI: 10.18422/73-17

D. Stonecipher

引用次数: 0

In re Anastaplo Revisited - A Half Century Later 半世纪后，阿纳斯塔普洛的再现

New American Studies Journal Pub Date : 2022-12-22 DOI: 10.18422/73-06

J. Rakoff

引用次数: 0

Letter of Miriam Redleaf (nee Anastaplo) about her father, George Anastaplo 米里亚姆·雷德利夫(姓阿纳斯塔普洛)关于她父亲乔治·阿纳斯塔普洛的信

New American Studies Journal Pub Date : 2022-12-22 DOI: 10.18422/73-07

M. Redleaf

引用次数: 0

Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence 本雅明的《暴力批判

New American Studies Journal Pub Date : 2022-12-22 DOI: 10.18422/73-10

James McBride

{"title":"Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence","authors":"James McBride","doi":"10.18422/73-10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18422/73-10","url":null,"abstract":"This article addresses the history of police violence and extra-legal killings of Black people and argues that social contract theory plays an ideological role to legitimate the coercive power of the state over the African-American community. The article first looks at the alarming numbers of Black Americans killed in the United States over the past few decades and compares police violence to the extra-legal lynchings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Using Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence, his classic 1921 essay, the article then describes the obfuscation of an underlying truth: that, far from being a neutral arbiter between its citizens, the state is the primary inscription of violence in the body politic. The police are the face of that state, both in its law-making violence (die rechtsetzende Gewalt) and law-preserving violence (die rechtserhaltende Gewalt). In contrast to the mythology of a social contract in which all members are treated equally before the law, the state targets African-Americans to legitimate its monopoly on violence, thereby unmasking the social contract as a racial contract, which has excluded Black people from the country’s very inception. The power of the state rests in part on the psychology of police officers who see themselves as its very embodiment and believe that any resistance to their authority is both a personal and symbolic challenge to their monopoly on violence. Yet, the article dissents from the view of many who believe that the country may transcend its history of institutional racism and violence and restore the promise of the social contract. The article concludes that, despite the hopes of modern liberalism, Benjamin’s theory leads to the conclusion that there is little possibility for either the redemption of the social contract or the rehabilitation of the state.","PeriodicalId":221210,"journal":{"name":"New American Studies Journal","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122041081","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}

引用次数: 0

Bomb and Climate Change in Fact and Fiction 炸弹和气候变化的事实和虚构

New American Studies Journal Pub Date : 2022-12-22 DOI: 10.18422/73-14

M. Torgovnick

{"title":"Bomb and Climate Change in Fact and Fiction","authors":"M. Torgovnick","doi":"10.18422/73-14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18422/73-14","url":null,"abstract":"This essay counterpoints two existential threats in our lifetimes—nuclear apocalypse and climate catastrophe—comparing how they have been recorded in historical documents and how they have registered in the American imagination. It surveys non-fiction and fiction, including a few films, to uncover persistent patterns of American denial that may lead—in fact, scientists increasingly believe will lead—to climate apocalypse. Strong historical and thematic similarities exist until, surprisingly and even shockingly, they diverge at their imagined endpoints.\u0000My essay turns to examples from the United States’ history as a nuclear power. These include governmental suppression of information after the bombing of Hiroshima, willful distortions of how the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved, and controversial museum exhibitions since 2000. I also analyze American perceptions of climate change, as directly informed by numerous, but flaccid, reports, conferences, and summits on “global warming” that activist youth groups now parody in postings and memes.\u0000The essay examines the kind of doom-laden fantasies that I myself once had about the threat of nuclear annihilation. It looks to the worlds of fiction and film for iterations of the same kind of dread and doom. Imaginative projections in fiction include motifs such as “empty cities” with no sense of human responsibility for the absence of people, strong themes of racial disparity, and the exploration of human depravity versus the possibility of cooperation and community. Primary fictional examples of nuclear plots include Cormac McCarthy and Octavia Butler, and the suppressed 1959 racial drama The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, starring Harry Belafonte and Inger Stevens. For cli-fi fiction, the essay touches on similar preoccupations in novels by Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, and a host of 21st-century others.\u0000My topic has renewed urgency in 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reintroduced the nuclear threat and forestalled action to slow climate change. But—and this emerges as an important payoff in the essay—nuclear and climate change narratives differ strongly in how we conceive of their endpoints. Despite sporadic fears about terrorists after 9/11, about North Korea, and now about Ukraine, Americans still by and large expect that, absent a true madman (Putin being a chief suspect), nuclear restraint will hold. In contrast, with regard to climate catastrophe, an increasing number of examples in both fact and fiction now expect climate catastrophes that will end humanity but (unlike nuclear winter), not end life on Earth which will remain, and increasingly become, both inventive and fecund. The essay ends with a meditation on the possible, even likely, consequences of expecting, and even accepting, the inevitability of climate apocalypse on a human scale.\u0000Archive: Selected 20th and 21st-century American novels, grouped by theme and outcome and cited briefly; a few 20th and 21st-century films; best-s","PeriodicalId":221210,"journal":{"name":"New American Studies Journal","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121734997","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}

引用次数: 0

Horse of Xian 西安马

New American Studies Journal Pub Date : 2022-12-21 DOI: 10.18422/73-18

D. Smith

引用次数: 0

Still Mad –On Feminism, Anger, and the Current State of U.S. Women’s Rights 依然疯狂——女权主义、愤怒和美国妇女权利的现状

New American Studies Journal Pub Date : 1900-01-01 DOI: 10.18422/72-33

S. Gilbert, Karin Hoepker

引用次数: 0

Unmarked Graves: Yet Another Legacy of Canada’s Residential School System. 无名坟墓:加拿大寄宿学校制度的又一遗产。

New American Studies Journal Pub Date : 1900-01-01 DOI: 10.18422/72-24

N. Thorne, M. Moss