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- Volume 36, Issue 2, 2017
European Journal of American Culture - Volume 36, Issue 2, 2017
Volume 36, Issue 2, 2017
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You should become uptight: The nexus of the body and technology in the poetry of John Giorno
More LessAbstractPerformance poet John Giorno began writing after he met William Burroughs and Brion Gysin in the mid-1960s. As such, the ideas pioneered by these two authors manifest directly in much of Giorno’s work. Giorno’s poem Suicide Sutra (print 1973 and two audio versions 1974 and 1975) brings together elements of the postwar American avant-garde in a text that focuses the reader’s attention on the body in ways that would reveal the transcendent ideals of somatic consciousness. This article explores the ways this poem transforms from a written text into one that more directly connects with the audience via the use of early vocal manipulation and tape looping technologies. In addition, this article will investigate how Giorno’s embrace of early synthesizer technology produced texts that envelope the reader and exploit the fissures in the body–mind continuum to connect with the audience.
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Silent landscapes, textured memory: Keith Morris Washington’s lynching paintings
More LessAbstractKeith Morris Washington’s landscape paintings have received surprisingly little scholarly attention, and thus the present article aims to address that lack. Primarily, this article argues that in representing landscapes associated with lynchings, Washington’s paintings are a form of cultural memory that helps us apprehend the traumas of the southern past. Rather than presenting us with dead bodies of lynching victims, Washington paints the ‘texture’ of violence and memory in seemingly innocuous rural landscapes. Through his brushwork, framing and visual motifs, Washington reveals what I am calling the ‘after-burn’ of lynching: the way in which it circulates as a kind of haunting and memory that disturbs our gaze. While lynching scholarship has expanded in recent years, there is often a focus – as with other contemporary visual theories – on looking at lynching photographs; we are encouraged by a number of critics to apprehend death directly. This article suggests that Washington’s artwork provides us with another visual mode of apprehending lynching. In registering the texture of violence and memory, and through intimating the presence of corporeality, Washington enables a form of looking that does not re-victimize the victimized. Rather, his visual ethics allows us to both see and not see the deaths of (primarily) African Americans across the nation and region.
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James VanDerZee’s New Negro vision
More LessAbstractIn her article ‘Selecting the Harlem Renaissance’, Daylanne English notes that ‘we must not underestimate the importance of photographs for the period’s construction of the New Negro, nor for our construction of the Harlem Renaissance’. As one of the foremost photographers working in Harlem in the 1920s, James VanDerZee played a pivotal role in conveying and perpetuating the image of Jazz Age Harlem as a flourishing black community. Despite his self-confessed distance from many of the cultural movements of the time, this article argues that much of VanDerZee’s approach was consistent with elements of New Negro philosophy and ideology, particularly that articulated by W. E. B. DuBois. That ideology viewed, as Henry Louis Gates Jr observes, the public self as something to be fashioned and shaped. Drawing upon a variety of visual tropes, some old such as cartes de visites and cabinet card portraiture, and some much more modern such as publicity photographs found in film magazines of the time, VanDerZee’s images chronicled the aspirational lifestyles of the emergent black middle class of ‘Strivers Row’ (north beyond 139th Street) and the various religious and sporting organizations that permeated Harlem and played a crucial role in developing a civic culture. In doing so, VanDerZee challenged prevailing stereotypes of African Americans then in circulation within American popular culture and helped to change the image of African Americans in the United States.
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Sweet sick teens: Gothic narratives of American adolescent sexuality
By Cara KoehlerAbstractPivotal to the transition into adulthood is sexual maturation, an inescapable rite of passage which this article investigates across a range of contemporary American media. Beginning in the 1980s through the turn of the twenty-first century, the works in this archive tend to represent the increasingly politicized, stigmatized adolescent body as a conflict zone, a liminal precinct in which sex, illness and death often intersect to traumatic and Gothic effect. They consist of culturally influential ‘indie’ narratives that bridge the gap or, at times, blur the line between the mainstream and cult subculture. Starting from Victor Turner’s seminal work on the adolescent’s passage into adulthood, I place the concept of liminality side by side with the cultural imagination of the frontier. The sex and death dichotomy that characterizes adolescent sexuality shares with the fundamental trope of the frontier a wide array of Gothic connotations. Pre-existing scholarship on Gothic teen studies has yet to extrapolate on the portrayals of sickly teen bodies that run rampant in Gothic works. To append this missing link, I discuss Freudian drives, Susan Sontag’s illness metaphors, and Priscilla Wald’s readings of contagion narratives to lay the groundwork for the connection between sex, illness and cultural anxieties that these late-century narratives communicate. Indeed, I understand contemporary Gothic along the lines of Catherine Spooner, who quipped in her 2006 monograph that ‘[l]ike a malevolent virus, Gothic narratives have [...] spread across disciplinary boundaries to infect all kinds of media…’ (2006: 8). I consider sick teen bodies across a variety of works under two main headings: first, those that rely heavily on anaesthetized imagery to evoke the Gothic. Beginning with 2015’s genre-bending It Follows (Mitchell), I work backwards to trace its clear-cut intertext – The Virgin Suicides (Coppola, 1993), a teen dream-turned-nightmare likewise set in suburban Detroit. The second heading explores decidedly more violent works, among them the graphic novel Black Hole and the horror film Ginger Snaps (Fawcett, 2000), which juxtapose adolescence and supernatural monstrosities that act as carriers of disease. The female is often at the centre of the narratives at hand, and though these works explore the world of minors, rarely, problematically are ‘minority’ bodies represented. Common to these works are stigmatized figures who fight for individual expression yet often fail to emerge from the adolescent stage as autonomous adults, due either to their unwillingness to conform to mainstream culture or the failure of this culture to integrate them.
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Reviews
AbstractThe ‘War on Terror’ and American Fiction: 9/11 Frames Per Second, Terence McSweeney (2014) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 256 pp., ISBN: 9780748693092, h/bk, £70, 9781474413060, p/bk, £24.99
American Cinema in the Shadow of 9/11, Terence McSweeney (ed.) (2017) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 352 pp., ISBN: 9781474413817, h/bk, £75
Notes towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, Judith Butler (2015) Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 256 pp., ISBN: 9780674967755, cloth: alk. paper, $27.95, £21.95, 25.00; ISBN: 9780674495562, epub; ISBN: 9780674495555, mobi
11.22.63, J. J. Abrams, Stephen King, Bridget Carpenter, Bryan Burk and James Franco (2016) USA: Hulu
Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader, Critical Ethnic Studies Editorial Collective, Nadia Elia, David M. Hernández, Jodi Kim, Shana L. Redmond, Dylan Rodríguez and Sarita Echavez See (2016) Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, pp. 556, ISBN: 9780822361084, h/bk, $109.95; ISBN: 9780822361275, p/bk, $31.95; ISBN: 9780822374367, e-bk, $31.90
Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America, Stacey Margolis (2015) 1st ed., New York: Cambridge University Press, 211 pp., ISBN-13: 9781107107809, h/bk, $103.00
I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems, 1975−2014, Eileen Myles (2016) London: Tuskar Rock Press, 356 pp., ISBN: 9781781257364, h/bk, £14.99
Chelsea Girls, Eileen Myles (2016) London: Serpent’s Tail, 274 pp., ISBN: 9781781257807, p/bk, £8.99
Home fires burning
Fallout 4, Bethesda Game Studios, 2015 Rockville, MD: Bethesda Softworks
Tom Clancy’s The Division, Ubisoft Massive, 2016 San Francisco, CA: Ubisoft
Homefront: The Revolution, Deep Silver Dambuster Studios, 2016 Planegg: Deep Silver
Other Things, Bill Brown (2015) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 485 pp., ISBN: 9780226076652, h/bk, $40.00
Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction, Lee Konstantinou (2016) Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 384 pp., ISBN: 9780674967885, h/bk, £31.95
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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)