Culture

Conference Review: ‘Protest: Resistance and Dissent in America’

Bianca Scoti and Dr Tomas Pollard review a selection of panels and the keynote lectures at the BAAS Postgraduate Conference (15 November, 2014)

Conference Review: IAAS Postgraduate Conference

The annual Irish Association for American Studies post-graduate symposium’s aim for 2014 was to explore and acknowledge the growing numbers of new scholars interested in American Studies, particularly in Ireland.

American Studies in Europe: Interview with Gözde Erdoğan, Hacettepe University, Ankara

“In my own academic career, there has been a natural trajectory from more literature-based research towards popular culture. After the emergence of neo-Marxism, post-structuralism, semiotics and postmodernism, I think the boundaries are collapsing and popular culture is becoming more and more a legitimate field of sociological study. I am also aware of the need for an interdisciplinary approach no matter what the field of research. Again, from my own research, I think Gothic studies are becoming more and more relevant, and should be explored as a wide interdisciplinary field.”

America’s Bloody Past: Massacre, Memory and Native American History

On a bitterly cold morning in November 1864, the windswept plains of South-eastern Colorado were the scene of a brutal and bloody massacre. Seven hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho woke with the rising sun to the distant thud of hooves heading to their village. The women cried out: “The buffalo are coming!” In fact the thunderous roar was U.S. Colonel John Chivington and 700 volunteer soldiers on the warpath. Alarm spread through the village and Chief Black Kettle raised both a white and a U.S flag as signals of peace. Chivington ignored him and his men indiscriminately opened fire on the encampment. When the firing ended 165-200 Cheyenne and Arapaho had been brutally slaughtered. While the warriors fought back, escapees dug pits to hide along the banks of Sand Creek, but their attempts to flee were no match for the guns and ammunition of the soldiers. Chivington and his men returned […]

Must-Hear Podcasts: A List for Students and Scholars of American Studies

In December 2014 we asked you what are the very best podcasts for students and scholars in American Studies. Here is the list we received!

Podcasts that made the list include the popular Serial, This American Life, Love+ Radio, Planet Money, Night Vale and BackStory to some surprising scientific recommendations, including NASA Science Casts and StarTalk!

500 Shades of Blues: ‘Bluesologist’ Gil Scott-Heron’s “H2Ogate Blues” as Meta-performance

For performance scholar Lesley Wheeler, “print exchanges presence for longevity, voice for script” but by including the audience reaction to an already recorded performance for “H2Ogate Blues,” Scott-Heron manages to pay tribute to the longevity of art through a permanent record while simultaneously honouring the presence of the poet in the original performance by putting him in dialog with a second audience … Scott-Heron refuses to substitute the importance of orality and performance that permeated alternative artistic cultures in the 1960s and 1970s, especially the Beat Generation, the Black Arts Movement and the Nuyorican Movement, for the textual condition that has brought artistic expression to the forefront of our everyday lives since the advent of writing and then printing.

Conference Review: Sixth London Colloquium of the Native Studies Research Network

The papers presented at this year’s colloquium focused on a range of diverse aspects of the study of Native American and Indigenous issues, from literature to history of thought, from art and visual studies to human rights,

Fargo 1996, Fargo 2014, and the Art of Homage

“Homage”: the deliberate but respectful recreation of one work within another. Think of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, homage to Ms. Dalloway; the BBC’s Life on Mars and The Sweeney; the stairway shoot-out in The Untouchables and the Odessa Steps scene in Battleship Potemkin. They are all homage, yet all their own.

But contiguous with homage is plagiarism: disrespectful, deceitful, and what one expects prima facie of Noah Hawley’s Fargo.

Conference Review: ‘Not Your Average Superhero’

The three panellists, Zara Dinnen, Tony Venezia and Daniel Rourke, set out to explore superheroics not on the cinema screen, but behind the keyboard, in the literary novel, and in relation to digital technologies.

Finding “Native America” in Jazz: The History of “Native Sound” in Jazz throughout the Decades

To look at jazz’s preeminent players and albums, or its popular historical narratives, one would think a “Native American” had never picked up a horn. Indeed, finding Native Americanism in a so thoroughly African-American art form may seem offbeat even for jazz. Yet a “Native jazz” tradition does exist— has done so, in fact, since the early days of jazz. That Native jazz exists shouldn’t really surprise us, given the common thematic ground (homesickness, hardship, heritage) between African and Native American cultures— given also the abundance of historical African-Native intersections, as established within extant African-Native American studies. Forbes was the first to consider such intersections, tracking them back into pre-colonial times. In his wake, Brennan et al established an African-Native literary canon reaching from animalist folklore to Alice Walker. In Brennan’s culturally oriented wake in turn, I outline and historicize here the African-Native musical form that is Native jazz.[1] 1930s-1960s […]