Book Review: Forging a Laboring Race: The African American Worker in the Progressive Imagination by Paul R. D. Lawrie
The Progressive Era (1890-1920s) was a time of intense social, economic, and political reform largely carried out by the middle class. Most scholars of Progressivism, including David Thelen and Daniel T. Rogers, argue that Progressivism is not monolithic and there has never been a coherent definition. Paul Lawrie has chosen to focus on one particular aspect of the Progressive Era: the deepening inequalities that occurred due to an industrial and economic boom, causing a rise in racism and racial policy.
Continue ReadingReview of Topophrenia: Place, Narrative and the Spatial Imagination by Robert T. Tally Jr.
Cultural geographer Robert T. Tally Jr. publishes widely and frequently on many aspects of literary geographies, including the myriad forms of map-making. This book comprises his latest research and presents an excellent introduction to his work. Tally Jr. espouses the cartographic imperative: simply by being in the world, he argues, we map and reference our surroundings in an infinite variety of ways.
Continue ReadingReview of “The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction” by Paul Crosthwaite
The most striking aspect of Crosthwaite’s latest monograph is the delicate balancing of complex interpretations of the relationship between fiction and the market, and accessible, colloquial examples and frameworks through which the reader is invited to analyse this relationship. The result of Crosthwaite’s success in negotiating this balance is that Market Logics is an attractive and engaging read for both newcomers to the economic humanities and experts alike.
Continue ReadingBook Review: A Literate South: Reading Before Emancipation by Beth Barton Schweiger
‘Culture is ordinary: that is where we must start.’ Raymond Williams’ famous statement provides an epigraph to Beth Barton Schweiger’s important study of reading in the antebellum South, A Literate South: Reading Before Emancipation. Barton Schweiger builds on Williams’ statement to provide a bank of evidence that culture was, indeed, ordinary, in the rural antebellum South. Using two chief examples, the diaries of two families, the Cooleys in Virginia and the Speers in North Carolina, Schweiger uncovers how reading and printed materials were important parts of Southern culture, and how this is often ignored in studies of the period.
Continue ReadingBook Review: ‘Who Rules the World?’, by Noam Chomsky
Many current American studies graduates were born around the time of the September 11 terrorist attacks and have grown up during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, two of the most controversial and polarising global events of the twenty-first century. The popularity of US foreign policy courses in American studies departments across the UK is therefore unsurprising. After all, students (and young people generally) tend to want to understand how the world around them works, and learning about the international behaviour of the most influential global player is in this respect a good place to start. Students’ motivations for enrolling often entail a desire to engage critically with US foreign policy in a deeper and more meaningful way than how it is often presented in the mainstream media and in political discourse.
Continue ReadingBook Review: ‘Hattiesburg, An American City in Black and White’ by William Sturkey
It is recollections such as Mr Conner’s that interlace the narrative of Hattiesburg – An American City in Black and White. William Sturkey, Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has steadfastly dissected archives and recordings to bring alive the history of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, a Deep Dixie South lumber town, inviting the reader in through a page-time continuum. The skilful use of recorded interviews gives his narration a personal note, leading an alternating discourse through the experience of Hattiesburg’s white and black residents. Sturkey emphasizes the South’s survival being crucially tied to the growing number of African Americans settling in. The Hattiesburgers were exceptional citizens whose civil rights were severely and unlawfully abused and abandoned. Sturkey notes how the black residents of Mobile Street were examples of fortitude and perseverance, and how their “civil rights movement revolutionized race […] through countless of acts of individual resistance.” (295) Even when discussing the white experience, Sturkey’s emphasis remains on the inequality and brutality as directed toward the black residents of the lumber town, where the realities of the black and white citizens of Hattiesburg could not have been more passionately different and where “every component of Jim Crow was reinforced by the threat of violence.” (85) Not even the smallest racial oppression imposed upon Hattiesburg’s black citizens is left out; such as the recollection of Osceola McCarty, who at a young age of twelve had to “trade the pencils and paper of a student for the iron and washboard of a laundress” (83) as the young girl’s help home was needed more than her education. The weaning and waning of the city become more tangible as Sturkey entwines the history with memories of one black family in particular – the Smiths.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Critical Lives, ‘Herman Melville’ by Kevin J. Hayes
Herman Melville by Kevin J. Hayes provides a readable, entertaining, and informative account of Melville’s life and esteemed contribution to American letters. Hayes expertly captures many of the major moments of Melville’s life in an exciting, satisfying manner, arguing that Melville’s entire literary career and, indeed, his life, contributed to the making of his 1851 masterwork, Moby-Dick; or, the Whale. Based on this one monumental novel, Melville’s place in the canon of American literature is secured, despite the fact that, as Hayes makes clear, Melville ‘had slipped into obscurity by the start of the twentieth century’.
Continue ReadingBook review: The Royalist Revolution by Eric Nelson
In recent years there has been a renewed interest in executive power on both sides of the Atlantic. In January 2017 the Supreme Court had to decide whether the United Kingdom’s EU membership withdrawal notice could be given by Government ministers without Parliament’s prior authorisation. It could not. The royal prerogative was insufficient. [1] In August 2017, President Trump controversially used the power granted to his office to pardon former law official Joe Arpaio. [2] He could. The President has the “Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States”. [3] Eric Nelson’s ambitious and provocative book The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding successfully demonstrates that these events are in a way deeply connected by uncovering the historical link between the British royal prerogative and the powers of the presidency.
Continue ReadingBook Review: The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery by RJM Blackett
In his new book The Captive’s Quest for Freedom, Richard Blackett isolates the Fugitive Slave Law as not merely a prerequisite for Southern agreement to the compromise but one of the most crucial political and legislative decisions in US history. The Fugitive Slave Law nationalized the recapture of escaped slaves and clearly implicated Northerners in the institution of slavery. He shows how the law politicized the escape of enslaved people to the North.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Tennessee Williams by Paul Ibell
Paul Ibell’s Tennessee Williams, part of Reaktion’s Critical Lives strand, provides a thorough, well-balanced overview of Williams’s life; it is a solid, well-considered addition to the biographical materials available on its subject, one of the foremost contributors to the American theatrical canon. Spanning just over 180 pages, Ibell explores three central aspects of Williams’s life-story: his tumultuous familial upbringing; the centrality of homosexuality and gender dynamics to his work; and the sharp, irreversible decline he experienced from the mid-1960s through to his death in the early-1980s, a decline punctuated by his fraught, painful relationship with his critics.
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