‘Let Us March On’: Lee Friedlander’s Civil Rights Photography and the Revolutionary Politics of Childhood Publics
This essay is the second in our series, ‘Literature, Visual Imagery and Material Culture in American Studies’. The series seeks to situate literature, visual imagery and material culture at the heart of American studies, and will explore the varying ways in which written and non-written sources have been created, politicised, exploited, and celebrated by the diverse peoples of the United States and beyond. You can find out more information here.
Continue ReadingMexican Migration in the Fiction of William Attaway
This essay is the first in our series, ‘Literature, Visual Imagery and Material Culture in American Studies’. The series seeks to situate literature, visual imagery and material culture at the heart of American studies, and will explore the varying ways in which written and non-written sources have been created, politicised, exploited, and celebrated by the diverse peoples of the United States and beyond. You can find out more information here.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Liam Kennedy, Afterimages: Photography and U.S Foreign Policy
The distance between global politics and its mediation to the individual is perhaps as proximal as it has ever been in our current moment, where information technologies and social media reduce the disconnect and render world crises as visible, immediate concerns. Photography, as the most readily-available and instant of all digital visual technologies, sits at the heart of how geopolitics and, specifically, conflict are culturally consumed. Such ideas are brought to the fore in Liam Kennedy’s latest publication Afterimages: Photography and U.S Foreign Policy (2016), in which he recounts American foreign policy, from the Vietnam War to the War on Terror, through the lens of photographic mediation.
Continue ReadingPatient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic by Richard A. McKay
Richard A. McKay’s Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic is a social history of the early days of the AIDS crisis in North America built around the harmful myth of the “patient zero”. The book contextualizes the story of Gaétan Dugas, the French-Canadian flight attendant who was vilified as the origin of the disease. In a larger history of scapegoating in times of epidemic, McKay’s book delves into Dugas’s personal life as well as the role played by Randy Shilts’ And The Band Played On (1987), the first popular account of the crisis.
Continue ReadingReview: Queer Work/Queer Labour
Conference Review: ‘Queer Work/Queer Labour,’ UCL, 15 March 2018 https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lgbtq-research/sites/lgbtq-research/files/queer_work_queer_labour_programme_4_2_19.pdf Professor Margot Canaday (Princeton University) delivered queer UCL’s annual plenary lecture on ‘“The One’s Who Had Nothing to Lose”: Days and Nights in the Queer Work World’. Canaday took audience members on a spatial tour of the ‘queer work world’ of the 1950s and 1960s United States. This was a working world comprised of service work, factories, bars and sex work: jobs that affirmed rather than negated gay identity, but which were also low paying with limited opportunities for advancement. Some denizens of the queer work world swapped better paid jobs in the straight work world for safety on the job, while others were forced to accept this type of employment after being kicked out of the straight work world because of an arrest or being purged from a government position. By showing how blue-collar factory jobs affirmed identity in […]
Continue ReadingBook Review: Nathanael T. Booth, American Small-Town Fiction, 1940-1960
From Disneyland’s ‘Main Street, USA’ to the historical living-history museum of Colonial Williamsburg, the small town has always held a mythic allure in the American cultural imaginary. For purveyors of commercial and cultural ideology, such as Walt Disney, Henry Ford, and Norman Rockwell, it is a sacrosanct place of American innocence. For other artists and social commentators, however, such as Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and H. L. Mencken, the small-town is an enclave of conservatism, insularity, and backwardness. In his new publication, American Small-Town Fiction, 1940-1960, Nathanael T. Booth assesses these ideological vagaries through the focalised study of mid-twentieth century American literature, arguing that the small-town is vital to ‘America’s self-fashioning’ (1) of a democratic centre that is characterised through changing modalities of nostalgia, utopia, isolation, and melancholy.
Continue ReadingQueer Clout – Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics by Timothy Stewart-Winter
Timothy Stewart-Winter’s Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics traces the history of the gay rights movement in the ‘Windy City’. Beginning in the post-war years, it provides a chronological account of decades of gays and lesbians fighting against police brutality, workplace discrimination, or AIDS, and for political representation up until the 1990s – all along following a red thread of the titular ‘clout’ and how it was gained.
Continue Reading‘Women of Genius’: The ‘Revolt from the Village’ in Mary Austin and Willa Cather’s Fiction
The American small-town has long been a telling index of American cultural identity and a genesis site for prevailing hegemonic ideologies, but many writers of the interwar period began a narrative iconoclasm of the small-town idyll. The Midwestern authors Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis, to name but three, destabilised the myth of the utopian small-town and instead rendered such spaces as provincial, lonesome, and conservative enclaves from which one must flee. This article contends that, between Mary Austin’s A Woman of Genius (1912) and Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915), a distinctly female ‘revolt’ lineage becomes apparent.
Continue ReadingWilliam Faulkner by Kirk Curnutt
Kirk Curnutt’s William Faulkner, the latest in Reaktion’s Critical Lives series, is a valuable contribution to the abundance of biographical materials on Faulkner, one of the United States’s foremost modernist authors. In under two-hundred pages, Curnutt provides a concise, informative, and highly readable account of Faulkner’s life and work. ‘Sole owner and proprietor’ of Yoknapatawpha County (which he famously termed as his ‘own little postage stamp of native soil’[i]); author of nineteen novels and several dozen short stories; and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1950) and the Pulitzer Prize (1955, 1963), Faulkner’s legacy and position in American letters is indisputable. At the same time, however, Faulkner was also a fiercely private individual, who balked at reporters and biographers intruding upon his home and family. In a letter to his editor, Malcolm Cowley, Faulkner emphasised his distaste for ‘photographs’ and ‘recorded documents’.[ii] He professed his ‘ambition to be, as […]
Continue ReadingThe Death Dance: the Pickwick Club Disaster in Boston, 1925
Investigations would later reveal that the Pickwick was structurally unsound, but in the immediate aftermath of the disaster city officials, the media, and residents speculated over the cause, with many concluding that jazz music and jazz dancing were responsible.
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