COMPARATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES最新文献

{"title":"Canary in a Coal Mine: From Mine Safety Technique to Animal Metaphor (Animals Special Issue)","authors":"Brian James Leech","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2023.2278374","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2023.2278374","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTIn the early twentieth-century coal miners used canaries to detect the presence of poisonous gases underground. Miners treasured canaries for their cheer, partnership, and assistance. This safety practice had largely ended in the United States by the middle of the twentieth century, but the phrase ‘canary in a coal mine’ took on an extended life as a metaphor, signaling impending disaster in a variety of situations. The metaphor’s malleability encouraged the inclusion of caged birds as a plot device. Horror and science fiction films like The Birds, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Arrival, and Bird Box use birds to signal invisible, hard-to-explain risks. The coal mine canary therefore became a sentinel for the most troubling social and political anxieties of each era. It signaled people’s worries that they could no longer identify and manage dangers in the modern world, whether those had to do with warfare, the environment, federal surveillance, social media, or epidemics. The birds’ use as a warning symbol, though, took miners’ beloved, sentient animal and turned it instead into a simple, but powerful tool. The coal mine canary’s continued prescence in popular culture also suggests that Americans remain concerned about the viability of new technologies in a rapidly changing world.KEYWORDS: Mininghorrorscience fictionanimal studiestechnology AcknowledgmentsThanks to the editors of this special issue and the reviewers of this article for their helpful comments. Thanks also to historian James Esposito for his research advice.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Additional informationNotes on contributorsBrian James LeechBrian Leech is Associate Professor of History at Augustana College, where he chairs the Department of History and coordinates its Food Studies program. He is the author of The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit (2018), which won the biennial Clark C. Spence Award for the best book in mining history from the Mining History Association.","PeriodicalId":29897,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES","volume":" 48","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135242943","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":"‘Tis the Season?: The Context and Significance of the “War on Christmas”","authors":"Emma Long","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2023.2273078","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2023.2273078","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":29897,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES","volume":"64 9","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135540125","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":"Searching for Black Santa: The Contested History of an American Holiday Tradition","authors":"E. James West","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2023.2275959","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2023.2275959","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the contested history and complex politics of the Black Santa in the United States from the antebellum period to the present day. For white journalists and entertainers during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the blackface Santa reinforced white dominance and the supposed inferiority of Black people. From the 1910s into the 1950s, Black educators and civic reformers saw the ‘Negro Santa Claus’ as a way of elevating Black self-esteem and countering racist versions of the character. For some activists and business leaders, the ‘Civil Rights Santa’ that emerged in parallel with the postwar African American freedom struggle could promote ‘good interracial feelings in the community’, and for others he belonged on the frontlines of the battle for racial equality. The Black Power Santa or ‘Soul Santa’ who came in his wake served as a symbol of Black cultural pride and economic self-determination. Finally, the modern Black Santa works to reconcile the more confrontational politics of earlier iterations with a celebration of American multiracialism and corporate responsibility. Across time and space, these different versions of the Black Santa embody competing and, at times, contradictory racial ideologies and representational politics, providing an important window into the relationship between civil rights, cultural politics, and consumer capitalism in the modern United States.","PeriodicalId":29897,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES","volume":"18 18","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135972695","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":"‘Now I Have a Machine Gun, Ho-Ho-Ho’: Masculinity, Family, and Redemptive Violence in <i>Home Alone</i> and <i>Die Hard</i>","authors":"Melodie Roschman","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2023.2268473","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2023.2268473","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTIn a 2017 article for the comedy website Cracked, Christopher Daed argues that “Die Hard and Home Alone are the EXACT same movie.” Daed was not the first to make this connection: a cursory search reveals frequent comparison on social media. Very little scholarship, however, has seriously engaged with this pairing. In this paper, I examine how both Die Hard (1988) and Home Alone (1990) use narratives of redemptive violence to define idealized American masculinity. Both films portray families ruptured by influences both foreign (the imposition of foreign culture) and domestic (maternal neglect) that are restored by their protagonists’ defense of Christmas, family, and by extent, old-fashioned American values. I situate both Die Hard and Home Alone within the canon of American Christmas films, arguing that their enduring, linked popularity is indicative of a rejection of the perceived weakness and femininity associated with many other Christmas narratives. I focus in particular on the films’ oft-overlooked treatment of religion: Christmas, after all, is a religious holiday, and its relationship to American identity cannot be separated from the ubiquity of Christianity in American life. I argue that both Kevin McCallister’s church attendance and his violent defense of his home align him with John McClane as all-American defenders of Christmas and the family.KEYWORDS: Home aloneDie HardmasculinityChristmasholiday moviesEvangelical christianityviolence Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. The majority of It’s a Wonderful Life, however, does not take place at Christmas, and the film only came to be associated with the holiday because broadcasters started airing it during Christmas in 1976, after it entered the public domain. White Christmas, which prominently features WWII veterans in its plot, reuses the song ‘White Christmas’ from the less enduringly popular WWII-era film, Holiday Inn (1942).2. A blatantly festive name: John must save her and, in doing so, save Christmas. I have chosen to refer to her by her first name throughout this paper for the practical reason of not choosing between or constantly using both of her last names.3. Holly is able to work as an executive because she is aided in housework and motherhood by her nanny, a woman of color who a sleazy reporter threatens with potential deportation in order to gain access to the McClane children. Though the film does not comment on this work arrangement, it quietly speaks to the often-unacknowledged labor done by working class women (frequently women of color) in order to allow upper-middle class white women to ‘have it all’.4. Leading to a long-standing meme in which fans ask ‘what Kevin McAllister’s dad did to afford this house & a vacation to Paris for 9 people’ and suggest theories such as the McAllisters being a mob family (Bruk Citation2016). Notably, this meme is at least partially based on error: the film establishes that ","PeriodicalId":29897,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135617930","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":"‘The Santy Claus myth’: The Politicisation of Santa Claus During the Great Depression","authors":"Jack Hodgson","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2023.2255439","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2023.2255439","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTThis article argues that the commercial celebration of Christmas and children’s reverence to Santa Claus became politically contentious during the Great Depression when well-established Christmas traditions were threatened by economic strife. Growing numbers of parents simply could not afford to fill their children's stockings. Santa Claus was easily recognisable as a religious and cultural figure but during the Depression era the potential political connotations and messages of the legend became clear, especially when under threat. The nation’s ability or otherwise to indulge youths in Christmas fantasies and fun became a barometer for the health of capitalism and the nation. Santa Claus embodied important American values including the emerging right to a childhood, Christianity, and the capitalist system. Some radical youths participated in so-called anti-Christmas parties and pledged to expose what they called ‘the Santy Claus myth’ to their peers whilst journalists, literary figures, philanthropists, and the federal government mobilized together to protect Christmas traditions including the cult of Santa Claus. In doing so they worked to protect a form of celebration which had wider implications. Any percieved attack on the notion of Santa Claus was not only an attack on fun but was interpretted as an attack on the United States and its ideals.KEYWORDS: Childhood ritualsChristmasCommunismGreat depressionSanta claus Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1. An example of Santa Claus being profaned is the furore that followed Time magazine’s publication of a photograph in 1948 which showed robed members of the Ku Klux Klan alongside their Grand Dragon who was dressed as Santa, distributing Christmas presents. The magazine itself called the photograph the ‘most incongruous’ of the week, whilst reactions included calling the spectacle ‘perverted’ and proof ‘there is such a thing as the Devil’ (Hagstrom Citation1966, 251).Additional informationNotes on contributorsJack HodgsonJack Hodgson is a lecturer at the University of Roehampton, London. His work examines the histories of childhood, boyhood masculinity, children’s art, and children’s political activism. He was recently awarded the Scottish Association for the Study of America’s Ellen Craft Prize. His work has also appeared in Rethinking History and the Journal of American Studies and his first book, Young Reds in the Big Apple, is under contract with Fordham University Press.","PeriodicalId":29897,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135968919","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":"Selling Santa: How <i> Miracle on 34 ^th Street </i> Stole (And Rebranded) Christmas","authors":"Vaughn Joy","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2023.2267337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2023.2267337","url":null,"abstract":"American Christmas traditions developed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an amalgamation of various communities’ customs, media representations of the holiday, and civic celebrations within the public sphere. One cultural touchstone throughout this period was within department stores where store Santas helped to streamline the identity of the national secular holiday. Miracle on 34th Street, in portraying an updated version of the Santa Claus figure within Macy’s department store on film, rebranded the Christmas figure and his connections to commercialism through manipulation of his mythology. By emphasising the secular faith placed in Santa, Miracle on 34th Street contributed to a lasting connection between the American Christmas and an emerging commercialist religion.","PeriodicalId":29897,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136357829","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":"Winter Wonderlands: Outdoor Adventure and the Reinvention of Christmas, 1870–1900","authors":"Malcolm McLaughlin","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2023.2257954","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2023.2257954","url":null,"abstract":"For many Americans, Christmas became inextricably linked to a celebration of the outdoor life in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Earlier generations of genteel folk in New York had taken the festival indoors, setting a fashion for many of the customs recognised to this day, and shaping a celebration of family and piety, home and consumption. But Christmas did not stay indoors forever. Appealing to a growing, broad middle-class interest in outdoor sports during the Gilded Age of the 1870s-1890s, a proliferating range of magazines shaped new ideas about leisure and recreation, and in festive special issues, about Christmas too. Sitting by the fire in dark and chilly December, readers of magazines like Forest and Stream or Outing could find encouragement to enjoy an active, outdoor Christmas Day, to venture into the winter landscape on skate or sled perhaps, or equally to lose themselves in stories of sport and adventure that could take them on imagined escapes, to the icy forests and mountains of the North, to sunny Florida and California, or to faraway lands, overseas. In these ways outdoor-sports magazines brought to mind wonderlands of thrill and enchantment. In the process, they reimagined Christmas for the twentieth century and the age of individualism and play, leisure and consumption.","PeriodicalId":29897,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES","volume":"94 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136130678","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":"‘The Most Famous Outlaw in the Whole USA’: Parody, Performance and the Nuancing of Jane Russell’s Persona in Her Early Western Promotion","authors":"Ellen Wright","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2023.2255436","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2023.2255436","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTThis paper examines the star figure, both literally and figuratively, of Jane Russell, a glamorous Hollywood actress, singer, dancer and comedienne who first rose to American public prominence through a promotional censorship scandal surrounding Howard Hughes’ 1943 Billy the Kid narrative, The Outlaw. Whilst Russell starred in a raft of Hollywood westerns throughout the course of her long film career, this paper will examine Russell’s representation, early in that career, particularly in the films and the promotional materials for the 1948 Bob Hope comedy vehicle, The Paleface, it’s 1952 sequel; Son of Paleface, and her cameo appearance that same year, in one of the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby's immensely popular 'Road to' films, Road to Bali. This paper will consider the way in which these roles provided ample means for Paramount to exploit Russell’s high profile, scandalous sexpot, pin up persona by deploying humour and deliberately and repeatedly referring back to her infamous film debut for Hughes, but will also consider how in these film’s narratives and promotion, her persona actually develops, admittedly starting with, but ultimately progressing beyond, her Outlaw notoriety, towards a more complex depiction of independent, active and assured womanhood that saw her through the remainder of her career.KEYWORDS: Jane RussellHollywoodwesterngenderpromotionsexualitypin-upperformance Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. ‘Pin-Up Parade’, Show Girls. Reproduced in Gabor (Citation1976), ‘Pin-Up: A modest history’ (Citation1945), 127.2. Cochrane (Citation2011), ‘Jane Russell’.3. As Russell (Citation1985, 96) remembers; ‘my role was like a ‘female Bob Waterfield – dry and flat. When the critics later said I was “expressionless”, I knew I managed to hit it: a stone face’.4. Hamilton (Citation2016, 13) argues that ‘Films do not simply reflect our present but construct a hyperlinear relationship the equally informs our understandings of both the past and the present. Specifically, the Western film and, potentially, historical films more broadly, constructor hyperlinear relationships with the past that does not simply reflect the concerns of the present no attempt to accurately represent the past but, rather, construct a fluid relationship between the two that privilege is both temporal localities and sees each as mutually informing and constitutive’.5. ‘There exists a well-established rhetoric regarding the immediate post-war era and American women; the narrative runs that having been urged to enter the workforce to aid the Allied war effort, once peace was declared America’s female populace were systematically coerced into the belief that their patriotic duty was once again as housewives rather than workers. It is claimed that Hollywood, along with other popular culture industries, was complicit in the propagation of this message’. Wright, ‘Glamorous Bait’.6. As Jancovich (Citation2010, 167) n","PeriodicalId":29897,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135148660","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":"Race in a “Civil” Frontier: The Chinese-Story Western of the Civil Rights Era","authors":"Philippa Gates","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2023.2255434","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2023.2255434","url":null,"abstract":"Today, when we think of the Western, we think of a genre dominated by white heroes conquering the obstacles of the frontier from daunting terrain to indigenous peoples. What we tend to forget – most likely because the most famous westerns did not show – is how Chinese immigrants played an important role in that history. The civil rights era film ‘Walk like a Dragon’ (James Clavell, 1960) is the only high-profile western which focused on the experiences of Chinese immigrants in the west. While Hollywood films of the 1950s and 1960s all but omitted Chinese immigrants from their vision of the frontier west, almost every television western included at least one ‘Chinese-story’ episode centered on Chinese immigrants and featuring Asian American actors. The representation of Chinese immigrants was not heterogeneous nor always progressive with some television westerns recycling out-moded tropes from decades past. What made the civil rights era film ‘Walk like a Dragon’ significant and unusual, even in the midst of the Chinese-story heyday on television, was its presentation of a Chinese immigrant through the visual iconography of the white western hero as a gunslinger and romantic victor.","PeriodicalId":29897,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES","volume":"76 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135735415","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":"The Distribution, Exhibition, and Reception of John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy in Madrid","authors":"Carlos Menéndez-Otero","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2023.2255437","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2023.2255437","url":null,"abstract":"The article uses data from the Spanish Virtual Library of Historical Newspapers (BVPH) and the digital archive of the Madrid daily ABC to trace the promotion and theatrical run of John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy in the Spanish capital. We begin by describing the main features of the local film market at the time of the movies’ release and how the shifting relationship between the US government, Hollywood, and the Franco dictatorship at the dawn of the Cold War affected it. By relating this with the archival data, we propose that Fort Apache was the most successful of the films in the Trilogy, despite its blatant non-alignment with the regime’s uncritical militarism. We also contend that the commercial prospects of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and, especially, Rio Grande were damaged by the delay in importing them and what seems to have been an attempt to use them to help naturalize the U-turn in the regime’s relationship with and discourse on the United States in the early 1950s, and the concessions it had to make in the Pact of Madrid (1953).","PeriodicalId":29897,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135717882","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}