60 Seconds with BAAS 2017 Conference Organisers
The U.S. Studies Online 60 Seconds interview feature offers a short and informal introduction to a postgraduate, academic or non-academic specialist working in the American and Canadian Studies field or a related American and Canadian Studies association.
Dr. Lydia Plath and Dr. Gavan Lennon are the organisers of the 62nd Annual British Association for American Studies conference, to be held at Canterbury Christchurch University, 6-8 April, 2017.
A Woman’s Place is in the Resistance
How can writing escape complicity? As the 21st century version of nationalist authoritarian politics has internalised the postmodern recognition that language constructs reality, and warped it for its own purposes in Donald Trump’s ‘tweet-politics,’ a literature-focused backlash is developing. Katharina Donn discusses modernist and contemporary practices of hybrid women’s writing, and explores their politics of form.
Continue Reading‘The Water-Cure Journal and Herald of Reform’: Understanding Hydropathy in Antebellum America
A highlight of Adam Matthew’s ‘Popular Medicine’ collection is its rich repository of magazines and periodicals. These publications reveal the confluence of two important nineteenth century trends – the proliferation and democratisation of American print culture, and the development and diversification of American medicine and health reform. One of these periodicals was the Water-Cure Journal and Herald of Reform, the foremost publication of the hydropathy movement in the United States. Hydropathy, which advocated the internal and external application of water to the body as a means to promote health, happiness, and longevity, was one of several alternative medical practises which gained popularity in the antebellum United States.
Continue ReadingCreating Model Americans: The Mississippi Choctaw Billie Family and Relocation
This 1956 photograph captures a smiling couple with their four children, all dressed in their Sunday best – crisp white shirts for father and son, frilly dresses for the two little girls. The family poses around an armchair in front of their television set, displaying their homely apartment. This is not your average white middle-class family, however. Paul Billie and his wife were members of the Mississippi Choctaw Tribe, who relocated from Mississippi to Chicago in 1953. The only giveaway to the family’s background is their dark hair and skin.
Continue ReadingThe Best of 2016, and What’s next in 2017
2016 has been an eventful year for USSO, marked by much excitement and many firsts. Aside from the redesign of our newsletter and a few tweaks of our website, we’ve said our thanks and goodbyes to our previous editors, and have welcomed a new editorial team, who were introduced to the wider AM/CAN community — alongside new members of the BAAS Executive Committee — in a revival of our ‘60 Seconds With’ feature. 2016 also saw the appointment of our first European Relations Assistant Editor, Katharina Donn.
Continue ReadingMost Viewed Posts of 2016
10) Film Review of Trumbo (2015) by Hannah Graves Working from Bruce Cook’s recently re-issued biography, Trumbo (2015) follows Communist Party member Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) from his appearance before HUAC in 1947 through his jailing, his years writing screenplays pseudonymously, and, finally, his blacklist-breaking accreditation as the writer of both Spartacus (1960) and Exodus (1960). Midway through the film director Jay Roach recreates the moment that familiar protest photograph was taken and his film is at its best when it seizes on the pathos of the image by focusing on the writer’s family as they struggle to hold him afloat. Trumbo falls prey to some of the familiar tropes of Hollywood-on-Hollywood biopics, allowing the audience one too many opportunities to nod and purr knowingly at extended impressions of Golden Age stars. 9) ‘“Money, That’s What I Want”: Who Benefitted from the Crossover of African American Musicians in the 1960s?’ […]
Continue ReadingSTORIFY OF #BOOKHOUR CHAT ON BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME BY TA-NEHISI COATES
#Bookhour is an open forum twitter discussion between scholars and the public that takes place the last Tuesday of the month unless otherwise stated. Find out more here. Framing our US Studies Online series, ‘Race and the Carceral State: Race Relations in the U.S. today’, editorial team member and #bookhour leader Christina Brennan hosted a discussion of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me with a panel of UK researchers in African-American literature and culture. During the discussion Dr Lorenzo Costaguta, Dr Leila Kamali, Dr Doug Field and Dr Gavan Lennon discussed the genre of Coates’ epistolary-style work and considered the implications of the book being classified as autobiography or journalism. Debates arose around the significance of US regional identity to the book, and the relation between identity politics and political protest in the US, particularly in the wake of Black Lives Matter. The panelists ended the discussion about the setting of […]
Continue ReadingEmily Dickinson and the Nineteenth-Century Women Poets: The Poetics and Politics of Reticence
When discussing nineteenth-century American women poets, the term ‘reticence’ has been used, almost exclusively, by critics since the 1980s, to refer to poetic strategies that resulted from ‘psychic conflict and anxiety’[1]: women’s literary articulation was suppressed by the patriarchal system, and society demanded reticence in writing by women (e.g. elimination of anger, sexual feelings, and ambition in their work).
Continue Reading“In U.S. Cities or on Palestine’s Streets” – A Black-Palestinian Narration of Subaltern Geographies
In the audio-visual demonstration When I See Them I See Us, (2015) various Black American and Palestinian individuals and organisations forming the Black-Palestinian Solidarity movement express their apprehension of both groups’ subalternity by linking and remapping experiences between “U.S. cities” and “Palestine’s streets”.
Continue ReadingThe Louisiana State Penitentiary and the Limits of Prison Rodeo Photojournalism
The Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly known as Angola, is the largest and oldest maximum-security prison in the United States. Situated on eighteen-thousand acres of floodplain on the banks of the Mississippi River, Angola houses approximately five-thousand men, nearly eighty percent of whom are African American and all of whom have been sentenced to over forty years in prison for mostly violent crimes. Around eighty-eight percent of Angola’s captives will die within the prison’s walls. Angola is located not only in the state with the highest incarceration rates and some of the harshest sentencing laws in the United States, but also in the nation that imprisons a higher percentage of its citizens than any country on earth.
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