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- Volume 30, Issue 1, 2011
European Journal of American Culture - Volume 30, Issue 1, 2011
Volume 30, Issue 1, 2011
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Bucking the trend: Poitier at the frontier
More LessConsidering the privileged space that the western enjoyed in the twentieth century in the forging and endorsing of a certain kind of American national identity, this article argues that Poitier's presence as a frontier hero in some of the most overlooked and underestimated films of the man's career is of remarkable significance. Despite the exasperation of some critics at the formulaic nature of his three westerns, I will argue that the casting of Poitier as the westerner creates a disturbance in the construction of the on-screen American ancestor, raising vital issues concerning American masculinity, racism, miscegenation and freedom.
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Luftkrieg and alien invasion: Unacknowledged themes of German wartime suffering in the Hollywood blockbuster Independence Day
By Robert PirroWest German native Roland Emmerich's Independence Day (1996) is considered the prototypical Hollywood blockbuster of a post-Cold War era of globalization in which new impulse was given to the diffusion of American cultural products across national borders. Michael Rogin's analysis of Independence Day as a resonant document of post-Cold War American anxieties and hopes illuminates the meaning of the film for American audiences but fails to note the film's relationship to post-unification German anxieties and hopes. Referencing a key text in the postCold War German reconsideration of (non-Jewish) German wartime suffering, W. G. Sebald's essay on the cultural effects of the Allied bombing campaign (Luftkrieg and Literatur), and singling out Sebald's argument about the suspect role of fantasy in depicting unprocessed trauma, this article suggests how narrative and visual elements of Independence Day evoked problematic notions of German victimhood. However inadvertently issues of German national identity and historical memory were broached by Emmerich and his many German collaborators, the product of their collective efforts offered a cinematic experience that could resonate in distinctive ways with post-unification German moviegoing audiences.
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'Violence makes victims of us all': Pathos, vengeance and the politics of Clint Eastwood's Mystic River
More LessStarting with Jacques Ranciere's analysis of 'The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics', this article analyses the role of ethics, vengeance and victimhood in Clint Eastwood's Mystic River. In his brief commentary on the film, Ranciere uses Mystic River as an illustration of what he sees as a problematic moralistic turn in contemporary American politics and culture that conflates victims and violators and advocates for vigilante justice. Arguing that the film does indeed offer such an ethical turn, this article extends and complicates Ranciere's analysis with theories of nostalgia, pathos and film melodrama in order to show that Eastwood's film is more ambiguous and contradictory than Ranciere allows, but that this ambivalence works to intensify rather than defuse its dubious portrait of victimhood and vengeance.
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Art, morality and the national interest: Theodore Winthrop, Frederic Church and Martin Johnson Heade at the Tenth Street Studios in 1859
More LessThis article examines the relationship between the painters Frederic Edwin Church and Martin Johnson Heade, and the author Theodore Winthrop at a time when all three were tenants of the Tenth Street Studio building in New York City and Church was completing his important painting, The Heart of the Andes (1859). The article examines the close intellectual relationship between Church and Winthrop, who wrote a pamphlet to explicate Church's painting. The association of Winthrop's ardent nationalism and belief in American expansionism with this understanding of art as a moral practice is analysed and related to current interpretations of mid-century landscape. A discussion of Winthrop's 1861 novel, Cecil Dreeme, as a fictionalized account of the complexity of debates in the Tenth Street Studios leads into an analysis of The Heart of the Andes, which identifies complexities and ambivalences in the painting that put it partly outside the moral position. A comparison of The Heart of the Andes and Heade's 1859 painting Approaching Thunderstorm suggests Heade's opposition to Church's work as moral example. The article concludes by situating these positions and debates within influential accounts of US culture after the Civil War and arguing that the three-way conversation between its protagonists that began in 1859 exemplifies some of the tensions characteristic of attitudes to the arts in the society that went to war.
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 42 (2023)
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Volume 41 (2022)
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Volume 40 (2021)
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Volume 39 (2020)
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Volume 38 (2019)
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Volume 37 (2018)
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Volume 36 (2017)
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Volume 35 (2016)
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Volume 34 (2015)
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Volume 33 (2014)
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Volume 32 (2013)
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Volume 31 (2012)
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Volume 30 (2011 - 2012)
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Volume 29 (2010 - 2011)
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Volume 28 (2009)
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Volume 27 (2008)
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Volume 26 (2007 - 2008)
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Volume 25 (2005 - 2007)
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Volume 24 (2005)
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Volume 23 (2004)
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Volume 22 (2003)
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Volume 21 (2002)
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Volume 20 (2001 - 2002)