God and the Revolution: Christianity, the South, and the Communist Party of the USA
In an article written for the Financial Times in October 2013, the journalist Robert Wright claimed that “[o]rganised labour has never taken hold in the American South, where unions are viewed with suspicion”. He quoted Nelson Lichtenstein, a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who argued that this was reinforced by Southern religion.[1] This perception also permeates much of the historiography of the region.[2] There is clearly some valid evidence for this interpretation, including Irving Bernstein’s belief that, since mill owners’ paid ministers’ salaries, religion could be used to tamp down labour activism.[3] As the Nobel Prize-winning American author Sinclair Lewis wrote during the Depression: employers controlled “the whole human train, down to the clerical caboose”.[4] Nevertheless, I believe that a more nuanced examination is required. Religion in the American South was, after all, remarkably varied.[5] With that in mind, this article looks at what may appear […]
Continue ReadingReview (Part Two) of IAAS Annual Conference
The design and implementation of a runaway artificial intelligence was a concern felt by many of the panellists. An AI that proved particularly threatening was one that may be built upon the incorporation of human minds into a computer network. The potential for an omnipresent surveillance filtered into an important term used at the conference – ‘hive mind’.
Continue ReadingReview (Part One) of IAAS Annual Conference
Usually in conferences, there are one or two panels that do not quite fit the theme. Not this year. Tied together by an excellent plenary from Dr. Lee Jenkins (University College Cork) it demonstrated the power that sight, surveillance, and vision possess on a multi-disciplinary scale.
Continue ReadingThe Significance of “ME” (1915): The Literary Fame of Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna)
Winnifred Eaton’s (Onoto Watanna) novel ME proved a turning point in literary history. Here is a book that is about a half-Asian woman (as readers might have suspected and certainly learned), and she is a half-Asian who is integrated in white society, upper and lower.
Continue ReadingReview of ‘Avant-Gardes Now!’ Symposium
Throughout the whole day there were repetitions of specific phrases which became tagged to the definition of avant-garde. Notions of simulation and mimicry were frequently raised in relation to the differences between what is imagined, and what is supposed.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Mindful America: The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Meditation and American Culture by Jeff Wilson
Mindful America is a superb study by Jeff Wilson, scholar of American religion, that situates the practice of mindfulness within the lineage of American religious movements. What makes this movement unique, of course, is the central focus on the traditionally Buddhist practice of mindfulness.
Continue ReadingStorify of our #bookhour twitter chat on MAÑANA MEANS HEAVEN by Tim Z. Hernandez
During April’s #bookhour discussion Dr Niamh Thornton, Dr Nicola Moffat, Eilidh Hall and Dr Donna Maria Alexander discussed the deeper meaning of the narrative and paratextual elements of the novel, the significance of biography in the third person, and how the landscape and cityscape functions alongside the two key characters of Bea Franco and Jack Kerouac. Read the storify here.
Continue ReadingMay Day and the future of workers’ internationalism
The conference “Workers of all lands unite? Working class nationalism and internationalism until 1945,” (University of Nottingham) highlighted how workers, now more than ever, need an international movement, one that can tackle the issues raised by a globalized system of production. (Review by co-organisers and labour scholars Lorenzo Costaguta and Steven Parfitt)
Continue Reading‘Now comes good sailing’: Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod (1865) and Early Postbellum America
Although the text for May’s forthcoming #bookhour discussion, Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod, has never attracted scholarship in the way that Walden, ‘Resistance to Civil Government’, and the Journal have done, it echoes the blend of geniality, history, metaphysics, and occasional grotesqueries found in the celebrated works of contemporaries such as Hawthorne, Melville, or Poe.
Continue Reading“The Land Entire Saturated”: Commemorating the Civil War Dead at 150 years
April 9th, 2015 marked the sesquicentennial commemoration of the surrender of the General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia to the Army of the Potomac under the command of General Grant. The surrender sounded the death knell for the shattered Confederacy. Appomattox was no cause for outpourings of joy; the conflict had dragged on for over four years and claimed the lives of over 620,000 American citizens.[1] Proportionately, if the war had occurred during the sesquicentennial years, the number of casualties would be approximately 6.2 million. Some historians argue that the 620,000 figure falls short of the mark, with James David Hacker estimating that the number may be as high as 850,000. As an internal struggle, the vast majority of the dead remain within the nation’s boundaries. Familiar battlefields act as sites for the concentration of their memory, there is no foreign Tyne Cot or Thiepval for this American bloodletting. […]
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