{"title":"Contestations Over Sacred Spaces in North America","authors":"Lucie Kýrová, Nathaniel R. Racine","doi":"10.31261/rias.15683","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.15683","url":null,"abstract":"The article serves as an introduction to the present issue, offering the reader an insight into the Editors' overall concept, as well as an overview of the contents of the issue's \"Features\" section.","PeriodicalId":37268,"journal":{"name":"Review of International American Studies","volume":"51 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139348709","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":"Indigenous Burial Spaces in Media: Views of Mi'gmaq Cemeteries as Sites of Horror and the Sacred","authors":"Jennifer Stern","doi":"10.31261/rias.14624","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.14624","url":null,"abstract":"The term “ancient Indian burial ground” holds bifurcated meaning for Indigenous and mainstream populations. What one group may respect as sacred ground where their ancestors rest, another sees the mystical –and frequently evil– site of forces beyond their knowledge influenced by an ethnic Other. This paper explores this dual labeling of North American Indigenous burial sites through media by looking at representations of Mi’gmaq burial gravesites. In director Jeff Barnaby’s 2013 Rhymes for Young Ghouls, main character Aila (Devery Jacobs) confronts two burial sites that turn the mainstream stereotype on its head: that of her mother which situates Indigenous burials in a contemporary context and that of a mass grave of children at her residential school which places malintent on settler colonial practices. The film highlights Indigenous ways of coping with these practices including violence, substance abuse, and art. Dissimilarly, Pet Sematary’s (1989) plot involves no Mi’gmaq representation but follows non-Indigenous Louis (Dale Midkiff) as he interacts with a stereotypical Indian burial ground imbued with evil, unknown magic that leads to the inevitable downfall of his entire family. Both films interestingly include zombies, and they portray Indigenous burial spaces similarly as shot from above and filled with fog. However, their conclusive statements placing the blame behind the horror are vastly different.","PeriodicalId":37268,"journal":{"name":"Review of International American Studies","volume":"61 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139348730","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":"Seeing Silence by Mark C. Taylor (A Book Review)","authors":"H. Coase","doi":"10.31261/rias.13732","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.13732","url":null,"abstract":"Howard Robert Coase's critical review of Seeing Silence by Mark C. Taylor.","PeriodicalId":37268,"journal":{"name":"Review of International American Studies","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77145697","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 Narratives of Topos: Eva Leitolf’s Deutsche Bilder – eine Spurensuche (1992–2008) and Postcards from Europe (since 2006)","authors":"German A. Duarte, Eva Leitolf","doi":"10.31261/rias.14862","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.14862","url":null,"abstract":"Around the turn of the century, the notion of topos (τόπος) underwent an interesting and necessary transformation. Presumably due to the popularization of digital technology, scholars started to progressively uncover the complex nature of the word by expanding on its general meaning as it pertains to the sphere of speech. This phenomenon granted to narratives some spatial characteristics, and at the same time brought into the light an old and critical relationship between text and image. In the form of a conversation, this essay deals with this critical relationship between text and image, and the way this conflictual relationship shapes social imaginaries, propaganda, and automatisms when representing social events. The essay will address these questions through an analysis of a series of pictures that had a great impact on Latin America’s social imaginary.","PeriodicalId":37268,"journal":{"name":"Review of International American Studies","volume":"72 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87114284","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":"To Staunchly “Remain a Reader” and build up a World Comradeship: Reflecting with Rabih Alameddine on World Literature","authors":"L. Marchi","doi":"10.31261/rias.12430","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.12430","url":null,"abstract":"What is a classic? To what extent are books and book collections endangered goods? What is the role and meaning of literature and translation in times of hardship? In An Unnecessary Woman (2013), Rabih Alameddine addresses these questions, while also indirectly contesting traditional canonical practices based on rigid hierarchies and the logic of national and linguistic purity. Alameddine highlights the violence inscribed in the practices of book selection and canon formation. In doing so, he troubles received notions of the canon, the classics, and especially of world literature, offering an alternative conceptualization of this long-debated category as an intimate, cosmopolitan assemblage of worldly texts.","PeriodicalId":37268,"journal":{"name":"Review of International American Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88940317","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":"Images to Remember: Nostalgia and Hegemonic Identities in Italia 90: The Movie","authors":"Bértold Salas-Murillo","doi":"10.31261/rias.14721","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.14721","url":null,"abstract":"The reconstruction of the past and memory is examined in the feature film Italia 90: The Movie (2014) by Miguel Gómez, which depicts the first participation of a Costa Rican team in a World Cup. The analysis includes the narrative, visual, and sound operations with which the past and memory are recreated (... or created), as well as the ways in which the story involves the viewers, particularly those who remember the episode. It is explained that, although the story resorts to certain topics of sports cinema, it is presented more as an adventure of the community, which would eventually include an entire country, and favors the exploration of the intimate over the epic. Italia 90: The Movie appeals to nostalgia, through recognizable images and sounds, as well as figures anchored in the hegemonic Costa Rican imaginary (such as the “common peasant”), to narrate an episode that, in addition to being central in the history of sports in Costa Rica, it is among the events that symbolically mark the country's entry into the globalized world.","PeriodicalId":37268,"journal":{"name":"Review of International American Studies","volume":"121 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88876549","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":"Original Pronunciation and the United States: The Case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Paul Meier (2010, 2012)","authors":"Emiliana Russo","doi":"10.31261/rias.13757","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.13757","url":null,"abstract":"In 2004 Romeo and Juliet in Original Pronunciation (OP) was staged at Shakespeare’s Globe, inaugurating what Crystal would later define the OP movement (2016) - a movement aiming to restore the original sound of both the literary and non-literary works of the past. While academic literature suggests an irregular theatrical interest in the Shakespearean OP in the UK, it also demonstrates that such restoratory projects have proven increasingly appealing to the US audiences. The reasons why the North American theater goers' are attracted to the Shakespearean OP remain unclear. Based on a qualitative analysis of interviews with Paul Meier, the director of the theatrical and radio production A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2010, 2012) and two of his cast members, and complementing the findings with the study of promotional and non-promotional articles concerning the productions, this paper aims to shed light on the rationale behind the North American fascination with the Shakespearean OP. As Meier’s reflections gravitate towards the identity of the US as a former British colony, this study, relying extensively on literature review, is carried out both through the lens of literary/cultural history and of historical linguistics. Finally, though limited in its scope, this paper intends to pave the way for further studies on the relationship between the allure of the OP and the US culture, and thereby to enrich the area of investigation concerning Shakespeare's reception in the US and his role in the American culture.","PeriodicalId":37268,"journal":{"name":"Review of International American Studies","volume":"134 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84518637","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":"Of Cannibals and Witches: Monstrosity and Capitalism at the Onset of Colonial Visual Culture","authors":"Gustavo Racy","doi":"10.31261/rias.14720","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.14720","url":null,"abstract":"This article provides preliminary insight into the creation of colonial visual culture. Using visual examples, the author shows how the encounter between European and Amerindian was, at first, apparently deprived of moral judgement, later being increasingly signified through moral and physical monstrosity, especially the female body, which served as an apparatus to assure colonial dominion. Looking mostly at the works of Liègeois artist Theodor de Bry, the author shows how increasing female protagonism may have helped to coin a proper visual culture that mirrored the development of productive force in early capitalism. Assuming that the European colonizer in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was still highly informed by Medieval culture, the author quickly retraces how the New World was imagined through cartography, following to the first depictions of the Amerindian and, finally, focusing on de Bry’s work and an argument on capitalism and how visual culture may help us understand its process.","PeriodicalId":37268,"journal":{"name":"Review of International American Studies","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77766919","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":"Latin America in Focus","authors":"German A. Duarte, J. Battin","doi":"10.31261/rias.14917","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.14917","url":null,"abstract":"A key distinction of Review of International American Studies is its commitment to the notion that the Americas are a hemispheric and transoceanic communicating vessel. This angle provides a unique path to de-center the American Studies discipline, which has become tantamount to studies of the United States. This angle also expands the discipline beyond its traditional literary roots, inviting critical investigations into other forms of communicative media, such as cinema, television, and photography. Informed and inspired by this conceptualization of the discipline, this issue of RIAS is composed of several pieces specifically focused on Latin America, each of which employs a unique interpretive approach of visual media to, collectively and comprehensively, articulate how this multilayered cultural landscape manifests in our contemporary social imaginary. \u0000The arbitrary delineation of the globe through the notion of ‘the western world’ has, seemingly, transformed the Latin American continent a no man’s land. In its vast extension, this part of the planet seems condemned to exist between two worlds. Despite being part of the western hemisphere, and despite its deep Catholic tradition, this vast region is surprisingly excluded as a member of ‘the west.’ Yet, it was neither placed in ‘the east,’ nor on the other side of the wall, when the world was politically, culturally, and economically divided by the Iron Curtain. This land’s perpetual homelessness might be due to its consistent political instability, to the weakness of some of its democracies, or even its colonial past, one that bears no relation to the Commonwealth of Britain, a belonging that placed Australia in the topos of the West. These reasons, in addition to others, have fostered an understanding of Latin America as being generally alien to the ‘western world.’ \u0000Being a no man’s land, deprived of a hemisphere, and broadly unintelligible by the general imaginary of the western cultural industry, this continent, populated by almost 700-million people, was traditionally subjected to stereotypes formulated during the twentieth century, and that remained unchangeable in this new millennium. Latin America has become, for the global imaginary, a place of military juntas, a vast lowland displaying desertic features, a tropical yet savage jungle, a poverty-stricken favela, and a land fought over by romantic revolutionarios. \u0000Certainly, the question remains if the obsolete model ‘western world,’ the also obsolete ‘third world,’ or ‘periphery,’ and even the in vogue ‘global south’ would be able to embrace and reproduce a closer image of this heterogenous and vast continent, and by extension if this generalization is able to denote a set of multiple series of social diversities. We doubt it. This doubt encouraged us to gather diverse scholars from diverse academic disciplines to contribute to this issue of Review of International American Studies. And this doubt, which was at a first glance only i","PeriodicalId":37268,"journal":{"name":"Review of International American Studies","volume":"111 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75752453","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":"Snapshots: On the Value of Photo/Sensitivity","authors":"Paweł Jędrzejko","doi":"10.31261/rias.15001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.15001","url":null,"abstract":"The article offers an comparative insight into two, parallel, narratives concerning a nautical event: one visual, and one verbal. The argument is based on the juxtaposition of Robert Cushman Murphy's photographic rendition of the so-called Nantucket sleigh ride (the stage of a whale hunt, in which the harpooned animal, attempting to flee his oppressors, tows the whaleboat behind him) with his description of the same phenomenon, which he included in his diary A Logbook for Grace. Whaling Brig Daisy 1912–1913 (first published only in 1947). The reflections stemming from the analysis concern the importance of the Barthesian punctum in the context of the interpretive power of the image, which, ultimately, leads to conclusions concerning the significance of emotions in the hermeneutic process of filling the spots of indeterminacy. Ultimately, the article demonstrates how, through his glass lantern images, Robert Cushman Murphy offers his audiences the “realist” truth, employing “modernist means” to “romantically” emulate the emotions. ","PeriodicalId":37268,"journal":{"name":"Review of International American Studies","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79703440","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}