Research

American Studies in Europe: Interview with Dietmar Meinel, Freie Universität Berlin

[starbox] Richard Martin: Your postgraduate work was undertaken at the John F. Kennedy Institute in Berlin, which was founded in 1963. How would you characterise the approach to American Studies taken at the institute? Dietmar Meinel: My personal experience has been shaped by two trajectories at the JFKI. On the one hand, interdisciplinary thinking is a feature of the American Studies programme at the Institute. Since it is composed of culture, literature, history, sociology, political science and economics departments, these different approaches to American Studies are felt from the BA to the PhD level. In addition, I have found my field of work, cultural studies, to be passionately engaged in a critical dialogue with particular groups and movements in U.S.-shaped American Studies. In my experience, issues of theory and questions about the field of American Studies as such played a vital role in the approach to American Studies at the […]

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,

American Studies in Europe: Interview with Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder, University of Mississippi

Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder: I suppose I am of a generation who has only known American Studies as transnational. However, I realize many problems have yet to be resolved – especially the danger for U.S. scholarship to colonize the work of other foreign discourses into a Western or rather U.S.-centric tradition under the auspice of the transnational. For non-U.S. scholars, American Studies has always been conceived comparatively, so the idea of a “transnational turn” is in danger of being patronizing unless there are more evenly weighted conversations. My greatest concern with the “recent trend” is that it does not necessarily conclude in transnational relationships with scholarship from institutions beyond its borders.

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.

American Studies in Europe: Interview with Zuzanna Ładyga, University of Warsaw, Poland

Richard Martin: Who do you think are the most interesting authors in American fiction right now?

Zuzanna Ładyga: In my understanding, interesting would mean disturbing to the audience and challenging the canon, in which sense the writers I consider interesting are Dennis Cooper, Carole Maso, George Saunders, Dave Eggers, Percival Everett, and Mark Danielewski. They’re all very different, of course.

Review: BrANCA Reading Group Session, ‘Forgotten Sensations’ and Sensationalism

We started the afternoon discussing The Leavenworth Case. A classic yet little-read piece of detective fiction, the novel opens with news of the death of retired New York merchant Horatio Leavenworth, murdered in his Manhattan mansion.

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 […]

Designing a Module, Redux: Or, Why We’re Watching Buffy Again This Year

In High Fidelity, Rob (John Cusack) muses on the art of making a mixtape: “The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don’t wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules.” Designing a module is a similar balancing act.