Frederick Douglass’s Literary Appendix as a tool of Self-Representation
“Douglass re-invented the format of slave narrative in his pivotal My Bondage and its Appendix by reproducing, repurposing, and reimagining his public performances.”
Continue ReadingHow American Commentators Commit Violence Against the Middle East
When I wrote to a leading US newspaper to propose a dismayed response to Thomas Friedman’s column for the New York Times, “Beirut’s Blast is a Warning for America,” I received a deeply unsettling response.
Continue ReadingWRAP for USSO – Serena Williams: Race, Representation and Feminism
Each year the University of Winchester invites undergraduate students to apply to participate in the Winchester Research Apprenticeship Programme (WRAP). An extra-curricular scheme, WRAP provides students with the opportunity to work with academic staff on ‘live’ research projects lasting up to four weeks. This reflective piece shares a case study WRAP project from our American Studies programme which aimed to contribute to the enhancement of an existing final year module, entitled: ‘African American History and Culture’.
Continue ReadingBook Review: “America in Afghanistan: Foreign Policy and Decision Making from Bush to Obama to Trump” by Sharifullah Dorani
Sharifullah Dorani. America in Afghanistan: Foreign Policy and Decision Making from Bush to Obama to Trump (I.B. Tauris, 2019) The new book by Dr. Sharifullah Dorani, “America in Afghanistan: Foreign Policy and Decision Making from Bush to Obama to Trump” is not just another story of Afghanistan’s troubled past, but rather is a remarkable account of the country’s modern history with details, facts and figures that presents in its entirety the reasons that made Afghanistan, in spite of its ancient and rich civilization, renowned globally for all the wrong reasons. The author does not merely present the story, he relives it and with him, all his readers. Dorani, Afghani himself, infuses the book with his personal interest and emotional connection to his country, explaining vividly why his homeland “has received nothing from the four-decade-long war but an extraordinary amount of suffering” and above all shows that he and his […]
Continue ReadingBook Review: ‘Who Rules the World?’, by Noam Chomsky
Many current American studies graduates were born around the time of the September 11 terrorist attacks and have grown up during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, two of the most controversial and polarising global events of the twenty-first century. The popularity of US foreign policy courses in American studies departments across the UK is therefore unsurprising. After all, students (and young people generally) tend to want to understand how the world around them works, and learning about the international behaviour of the most influential global player is in this respect a good place to start. Students’ motivations for enrolling often entail a desire to engage critically with US foreign policy in a deeper and more meaningful way than how it is often presented in the mainstream media and in political discourse.
Continue ReadingBook Review: ‘Hattiesburg, An American City in Black and White’ by William Sturkey
It is recollections such as Mr Conner’s that interlace the narrative of Hattiesburg – An American City in Black and White. William Sturkey, Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has steadfastly dissected archives and recordings to bring alive the history of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, a Deep Dixie South lumber town, inviting the reader in through a page-time continuum. The skilful use of recorded interviews gives his narration a personal note, leading an alternating discourse through the experience of Hattiesburg’s white and black residents. Sturkey emphasizes the South’s survival being crucially tied to the growing number of African Americans settling in. The Hattiesburgers were exceptional citizens whose civil rights were severely and unlawfully abused and abandoned. Sturkey notes how the black residents of Mobile Street were examples of fortitude and perseverance, and how their “civil rights movement revolutionized race […] through countless of acts of individual resistance.” (295) Even when discussing the white experience, Sturkey’s emphasis remains on the inequality and brutality as directed toward the black residents of the lumber town, where the realities of the black and white citizens of Hattiesburg could not have been more passionately different and where “every component of Jim Crow was reinforced by the threat of violence.” (85) Not even the smallest racial oppression imposed upon Hattiesburg’s black citizens is left out; such as the recollection of Osceola McCarty, who at a young age of twelve had to “trade the pencils and paper of a student for the iron and washboard of a laundress” (83) as the young girl’s help home was needed more than her education. The weaning and waning of the city become more tangible as Sturkey entwines the history with memories of one black family in particular – the Smiths.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Critical Lives, ‘Herman Melville’ by Kevin J. Hayes
Herman Melville by Kevin J. Hayes provides a readable, entertaining, and informative account of Melville’s life and esteemed contribution to American letters. Hayes expertly captures many of the major moments of Melville’s life in an exciting, satisfying manner, arguing that Melville’s entire literary career and, indeed, his life, contributed to the making of his 1851 masterwork, Moby-Dick; or, the Whale. Based on this one monumental novel, Melville’s place in the canon of American literature is secured, despite the fact that, as Hayes makes clear, Melville ‘had slipped into obscurity by the start of the twentieth century’.
Continue ReadingFor a Series so Concerned with Leaning into the Horror, The Handmaid’s Tale Utterly Fails to Address Race
Whenever the TV series or the new sequel to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale are mentioned, the same question arises: do we really want to know what happens after Offred (pre-Gilead name June) steps “into the darkness within; or else the light”? This is June’s infamous last line, which finds its way into the first series with meticulous fidelity before the HBO adaptation continues her timeline. Until Atwood released The Testaments in 2019, critics have been asking whether the HBO adaptation ought to have done this – yet the original novel did play with such boundaries, giving readers glimpses of past lives and future conclusions about those lives in the academic conference provided in the “Historical Notes.” What makes Handmaid so appropriate for this golden age of television is that the political premise finds its place just as comfortably in the Trump era as it did under Reagan.
Continue ReadingReconstructing the American Gothic in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
In the first episode of the Netflix series The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018–, henceforth CAoS), the title character’s Aunt Hilda declares, misty-eyed, that she is so proud of the young woman her nearly 16-year-old niece has become. Sabrina’s more cutting, rigid, and severe Aunt Zelda corrects her – “of the young witch you are becoming.” Zelda’s emphasis on the process of becoming, of the continual metamorphosis of young supernatural adulthood, speaks to the ways in which the series blurs boundaries, questions hierarchies, and constantly confounds binaries of identity. CAoS transforms the pathological, masculinist, and puritanical anxieties of the traditional American Gothic into a more fluid and shifting investigation of adolescence, femininity, and the uncanny.
Continue ReadingVisualising the Americas: Kent’s Third Annual Americanist Symposium, Keynote Addresses
What happens when you attempt to condense thousands of words, and years of research, into a single image? This was the challenge put to attendees of the Kent Americanists Symposium in June 2019 – to find and share the single image through which an entire wider discussion could be accessed.
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