Book Review: Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird, by Gene Andrew Jarrett
A comprehensive biography of Dunbar was long overdue. His brief life was influenced by most of the major forces affecting Black life after emancipation: the legacy of slavery, Reconstruction, civil rights, migration from South to North, city life and the limited integration it brought. His remarkable and swift ascent to fame showed the possibilities and the limitations of Black art for a population that sorely needed public voices. I understand Dunbar’s central place in the story of the late nineteenth-century better now than I did, and for that reason I am glad I read Jarrett’s biography. Still, I hope that those who seek this story in the future will have the opportunity to read a revised edition.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Ecology of Dakota Landscapes: Past, Present, and Future by W. Carter Johnson and Dennis H. Knight
Ecology of Dakota Landscape has beautifully blended the ecological attributes of landscapes of the Dakota region of the United States, its geological and ecological developments in recent centuries and the present environment, and prospective approaches to climate change. What is more, the book defines the changes in the region’s climate change and ecosystem, thus identifying the reasons and options for protecting it.
Continue ReadingBook Review: A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border Across Indigenous Lands by Benjamin Hoy
Author Benjamin Hoy successfully supports his three arguments and provides a foundational understanding of the racialised history of North American border control policies and their impact on Indigenous communities. Since the movement of people in the Americas is a prominent topic in today’s policy debates, this book offers an indispensable description of how current immigration policies were first developed to control the mobility of these Indigenous populations along with the formerly enslaved and Asia-Pacific immigrants.
Continue ReadingBook Review: John Dos Passos’s Transatlantic Chronicling: Critical Essays on the Interwar Years.
The University of Tennessee Press, $65 John Dos Passos’s Transatlantic Chronicling: Critical Essays on the Interwar Years (ed. Aaron Shaheen and Rosa Maria Bautista-Cordero) spotlights John Dos Passos’s (1896-1970) interwar writing career in consideration to his self-reputed role as a contemporary ‘chronicler’. This volume of essays is split into four parts: ‘Chronicling War and its Aftermath’, ‘Chronicling American Commercial Culture: Manhattan Transfer’, ‘Chronicling Political Ambivalence in the Age of Totalitarianism’, and ‘Chronicling the America-Europe Divide’. Notably, the essay collection succeeds in maintaining Dos Passos’s relevance not only as an eminent modernist whose montage/camera-lens narrative techniques are disparate to that of other modernists, but also as a figure struggling to remedy the division between fiction and non-fiction. Woven with Dos Passos’s wavering political leanings and residencies in Europe, John Dos Passos’s Transatlantic Chronicling nestles itself in the long-line of criticism surrounding the author. Its relevance lies in how his corpus is […]
Continue ReadingBook Review: FDR in American Memory: Roosevelt and the Making of an Icon by Sara Polak
Sara Polak. FDR in American Memory: Roosevelt and the Making of an Icon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2021), £54. In FDR In American Memory: Roosevelt and the Making of an Icon, Sara Polak evaluates how President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s image was constructed to resemble that of an American icon. In thematic chapters, Polak examines the changes and key points of Roosevelt’s public image, and also the individuals that created it. She persuasively shows how Roosevelt’s public image, and its shaping, still allows for him to be considered as one of America’s most popular presidents, over 75 years after his death. Polak’s work remains key in discussing the scholarship of America’s memory of the New Deal, but also sheds further light on the tools that were, and continue to be, used by American presidents to ensure that their legacy would remain for several decades. Building on FDR’s World: War, Peace, […]
Continue ReadingBook Review: Contemporary American Fiction in the Embrace of the Digital Age by Béatrice Pire, Arnaud Regnauld & Pierre-Louis Patoine
Béatrice Pire, Arnaud Regnauld, and Pierre-Louis Patoine. Contemporary American Fiction in the Embrace of the Digital Age (Sussex Academic Press, 2022), pp. 224, £70 Published earlier this year, Contemporary American Fiction in the Embrace of the Digital Age is a valuable resource for addressing issues around technology in the contemporary world, which it does by looking at how American fiction positions itself within the digital era. By examining how some of the important novels, short stories, films, and television series published and released since 2000 directly respond to the new digital landscape, Embrace of the Digital Age asserts that we can aspire to a better understanding of the conditions of that landscape, rather than simply being complicit in following technological advancement in whichever directions it goes. As both critics and readers, this understanding is essential due to ‘the technical systems that regulate our lives’ and determine the shape of our […]
Continue ReadingBook Review: The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives by Adolph Reed Jr.
During a long career spanning political science, activism, and journalism, Adolph Reed Jr has cultivated an enigmatic reputation among left public intellectuals, continually checking the inertial tendencies and oversights of contemporary left theorising to critique race reductionism and what Reed calls the left’s increasingly ‘quietistic’ cultural politics. Locked in ever-fiercer, internecine, and insular skirmishes adrift from site-specific questions of political economy, Reed suggests that this ‘flight from concreteness’ underplays the role of class, favouring representation over redistribution and thus undercutting opportunities for cross-racial mobilisation. [1]
Continue ReadingBook Review: William Faulkner and Mortality: A Fine Dead Sound by Ahmed Honeini
For scholars of the works of William Faulkner, his preoccupation with mortality may be best thought of as an attempt to evade, and even deny, the subject of his own death by, instead, creating an immortal presence and literary legacy through his body of work.[1] Faulkner, however, proposes that fiction was not simply a means of escaping death’s inevitability. ‘Man will not merely endure,’ as stated aptly by Faulkner in his 1950 speech as the recipient for the Nobel Prize in Literature, ‘he will prevail’.[2] With this sentiment in mind, Ahmed Honeini’s William Faulkner and Mortality: A Fine Dead Sound offers the first full-length study of mortality in Faulkner’s fiction.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Female Physicians in American Literature: Abortion in 19th-Century Literature and Culture by Margaret Jay Jessee
Margaret Jay Jessee. Female Physicians in American Literature: Abortion in 19th-Century Literature and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2021). pp. 108. £44.99. Female Physicians in American Literature: Abortion in 19th-Century Literature and Culture (2022) asserts that it is not the first time in the history of America that previously claimed rights are being revoked and something as grave as overturning Roe v. Wade is put into discussion. This book is a gem that reveals the root of American anti-abortion sentiments in the nineteenth century context and it is amazingly relevant to what is happening to the US in 2022. Margaret Jay Jessee takes the debates on the female physicians and female abortionists in nineteenth-century American fiction to a new level by building a compelling argument that draws on previous scholarship and deploys affect theory to reveal the roots of the ‘fear’ evoked by these characters and its impact on their depiction in the […]
Continue ReadingBook Review: The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era by Mark Atwood Lawrence
If there was anything that most historians had firmly placed on the list of Richard M. Nixon’s accomplishments – good or bad – it was that his presidency engineered a rightward shift in US foreign policy. Yet, according to Mark Atwood Lawrence’s important new study, The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era, even this too must be stripped from the 37th president’s beleaguered historical legacy. An analysis of US policy towards the ‘Global South’ during the 1960s, Lawrence’s book argues that the key transitions away from the ‘ambitious’ policies of the John F. Kennedy years were made not by Nixon but Lyndon Johnson. Under the pressure of the Vietnam War, political change at home, and increasing anti-Americanism abroad, Johnson abandoned his predecessor’s interest in transformative global change to focus on stability and lower costs, even if that meant embracing pro-US strongmen. Nixon’s subsequent ‘doctrine’ to this effect merely codified in rhetoric what was already the case in practice.
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