Politics

Teaching Radicalism

The second post in the ‘Teaching America’ series is by Dr Christopher Phelps (University of Nottingham), co-author of the new title Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War, who reflects upon the intellectual advantages and challenges when faced with designing and teaching the history of U.S. radicalism.

Teaching U.S Women’s History in British Universities: a Personal and Political History

The first post in our new HOTCUS-led ‘Teaching America’ series is by Dr Kate Dossett (University of Leeds) who reflects on her own experiences of designing a course on U.S. women’s history, and how she has encouraged British undergraduate students to consider how their own gender identity shapes their approach to the study of history.

Teaching of US Politics in schools under threat

The future of US Politics teaching in schools is in grave danger, says Mark Rathbone, teacher and Head of Academic Administration at Canford School. Whilst teachers and exam boards are fighting a rearguard action to preserve the elements of choice within specifications, there is so far little indication that the minister is listening.

In Memoriam: Legendary Civil Rights Activist Julian Bond

Activist, Politician, Lawyer, Writer, Poet and Educator, Julian Bond’s social activism and his long-standing service includes as Chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the oldest civil rights organisation in America from 1998 to 2010.

Julian Bond would have been at the celebratory centre of my British Academy-sponsored conference on “Civil Rights Documentary Cinema and the 1960s: Transatlantic Conversations on History, Race and Rights”. Julian Bond embodied the conference theme, as a co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and SNCC’s Communications Director from 1961-66.

Instead, the conference will take place in his honour and in his memory.

In Memory of E.L. Doctorow (1931-2015)

Tuesday 21 July Great American novelist E.L. Doctorow passed away. Today U.S. Studies Online features a profile of E. L. Doctorow’s life and works as written by Richard H. King, Emeritus Professor of American Studies, University of Nottingham. “Doctorow’s stylistic and novelistic flexibility allowed him to present a much richer and more interesting America than that of his contemporaries Gore Vidal, John Updike and Philip Roth.
We will miss him greatly.”

As American as Apple Pie: U.S. Female Converts to Islam

As U.S. citizens who understand American cultural and societal norms, American female converts to Islam are in a good position to serve as advocates and agents for change, not only for themselves, but also on behalf of their fellow Muslim Americans. These American voices are offering a challenge to both the greater non-Muslim American community and the Muslim American community in clearly articulated, individual voices saying: I am a ‘real American’, I am a ‘real Muslim’, I am ready to have the conversation. You bring the vanilla ice cream – I’ll bring the apple pie.

Racializing “Muslims”: Constructing a Muslim Archetype

More recently scholars, including those focusing on European Muslims, have incorporated the racialization framework to complement, rather than replace, Orientalism and Islamophobia to explain how Muslims experience prejudice and discrimination. This paper reinforces the racialization framework by arguing that in the United States Muslims have become victims of race-based violence through the construction of visible archetype of “Muslim” utilizing symbolic markers such as name, dress, phenotype, and language (Naber 2008). How do we explain the experiences of Muslims, who are ethnically, nationally, racially, and phenotypically diverse, in terms of racism?

Reading Islamophobia in Azar Nafisi’s “Reading Lolita in Tehran”

One of the more subtle platforms from which RLT promotes its unique Islamophobic agenda is the recurrent rendering of Islam as tantamount to Marxism and Communism in their alleged totalitarianism, strategies, and end results. In her discussion of the political milieu that dominated the immediate post-Revolution sociopolitical landscape in Iran, Nafisi’s memoir is predisposed to equate the predominant Islamic movement of the time with those of the Marxist and Communist parties.

“Atomic Ayatollahs”: The ‘Islamic Bomb’ in 1980s American News Media

The ‘Islamic bomb’ is and was shorthand for a perceived pan-Islamic desire for nuclear capability. Eliding nuanced understandings of the significant differences between strands of Islam, the diversity of the ‘Muslim world’, and the many different reasons why a country might (or might not) seek nuclear status, the ‘Islamic bomb’ was a trope that essentialised Islam and implied a monolithic religious bloc. Wilful misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the ‘Islamic world’ and its relationship with nuclear weapons have, however, been a feature of US media reporting since the late 1970s.

Islam and Americanness as Antitheses in Contemporary Media Discourses

Tropes created by much of corporate media suggest an incompatibility of ‘Americanness’ and the American-constructed image of ‘Islam.’ Whereas islamophobic tendencies in the US public sphere have been evident for a while, current approaches in the media are reaching new degrees of bigotry by propagating an alleged Islamic threat and evoking an omnipresence of fear. The construction of ‘Islam’ works flexibly enough to perpetually represent an antagonism to ‘Americanness’ which needs to be resisted and fought.