Book Review: Liam Kennedy, Afterimages: Photography and U.S Foreign Policy
The distance between global politics and its mediation to the individual is perhaps as proximal as it has ever been in our current moment, where information technologies and social media reduce the disconnect and render world crises as visible, immediate concerns. Photography, as the most readily-available and instant of all digital visual technologies, sits at the heart of how geopolitics and, specifically, conflict are culturally consumed. Such ideas are brought to the fore in Liam Kennedy’s latest publication Afterimages: Photography and U.S Foreign Policy (2016), in which he recounts American foreign policy, from the Vietnam War to the War on Terror, through the lens of photographic mediation.
Continue ReadingPatient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic by Richard A. McKay
Richard A. McKay’s Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic is a social history of the early days of the AIDS crisis in North America built around the harmful myth of the “patient zero”. The book contextualizes the story of Gaétan Dugas, the French-Canadian flight attendant who was vilified as the origin of the disease. In a larger history of scapegoating in times of epidemic, McKay’s book delves into Dugas’s personal life as well as the role played by Randy Shilts’ And The Band Played On (1987), the first popular account of the crisis.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Nathanael T. Booth, American Small-Town Fiction, 1940-1960
From Disneyland’s ‘Main Street, USA’ to the historical living-history museum of Colonial Williamsburg, the small town has always held a mythic allure in the American cultural imaginary. For purveyors of commercial and cultural ideology, such as Walt Disney, Henry Ford, and Norman Rockwell, it is a sacrosanct place of American innocence. For other artists and social commentators, however, such as Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and H. L. Mencken, the small-town is an enclave of conservatism, insularity, and backwardness. In his new publication, American Small-Town Fiction, 1940-1960, Nathanael T. Booth assesses these ideological vagaries through the focalised study of mid-twentieth century American literature, arguing that the small-town is vital to ‘America’s self-fashioning’ (1) of a democratic centre that is characterised through changing modalities of nostalgia, utopia, isolation, and melancholy.
Continue ReadingQueer Clout – Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics by Timothy Stewart-Winter
Timothy Stewart-Winter’s Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics traces the history of the gay rights movement in the ‘Windy City’. Beginning in the post-war years, it provides a chronological account of decades of gays and lesbians fighting against police brutality, workplace discrimination, or AIDS, and for political representation up until the 1990s – all along following a red thread of the titular ‘clout’ and how it was gained.
Continue ReadingWilliam Faulkner by Kirk Curnutt
Kirk Curnutt’s William Faulkner, the latest in Reaktion’s Critical Lives series, is a valuable contribution to the abundance of biographical materials on Faulkner, one of the United States’s foremost modernist authors. In under two-hundred pages, Curnutt provides a concise, informative, and highly readable account of Faulkner’s life and work. ‘Sole owner and proprietor’ of Yoknapatawpha County (which he famously termed as his ‘own little postage stamp of native soil’[i]); author of nineteen novels and several dozen short stories; and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1950) and the Pulitzer Prize (1955, 1963), Faulkner’s legacy and position in American letters is indisputable. At the same time, however, Faulkner was also a fiercely private individual, who balked at reporters and biographers intruding upon his home and family. In a letter to his editor, Malcolm Cowley, Faulkner emphasised his distaste for ‘photographs’ and ‘recorded documents’.[ii] He professed his ‘ambition to be, as […]
Continue ReadingBook Review: Constructing Presidential Legacy: How We Remember the American President by eds. Michael Patrick Cullinane and Sylvia Ellis
From presidential farewell addresses to depictions of presidents in film, advertising and literature, Michael P. Cullinane and Sylvia Ellis’s edited volume Constructing Presidential Legacyoffers a valuable addition to the growing body of literature concerning American presidential legacies.
Continue ReadingReview of Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past, edited by Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter
This collection of fifteen essays brings together a range of specialist academic perspectives on the remarkable cultural phenomenon that is Hamilton: an American Musical. It will be of interest to a wide range of people: fans of the show; professional scholars from a range of disciplines; and the general reader. It is an essential library purchase for anyone considering teaching courses which include this musical.
Continue ReadingOur Latest Longest War: Losing Hearts and Minds in Afghanistan
Aaron O’Connell is a veteran of the Afghanistan war — the aptly dubbed ‘latest longest’ one for the United States — where he served as Special Assistant to General David Petraeus. The book’s title evokes both the spectre of America’s other endless war, that in Vietnam, as well as the pervasiveness of war in American political and cultural life. This is only the most recent of America’s ill-advised and destructive campaigns abroad, and it will not be the last. Yet while the war in Afghanistan occupies a place of particular importance in the litany of American wars, both because of its duration and its temporal location as a marker of the pre- and post-9/11 grand strategy of the United States, it is being fought at increasing distance from American consciousness. Indeed, one well-known political commentator recently remarked that America is no longer at war today, having apparently forgotten that this […]
Continue ReadingMore on War by Martin Van Creveld
“You may not be interested in war, but war may be interested in you.” (p.1) How many of us want to read about war? Does it remind us all of pain, loss, blood and misery? Martin Van Creveld’s newest book, “More on War”, is not a story of these things. He uses examples drawn from military history to explain what war is and add More to what we already know on this difficult subject.
Continue ReadingAfter Katrina: Race, Neoliberalism, and the End of the American Century
Over the last decade, Anna Hartnell has unofficially established herself as the UK’s leading academic on Hurricane Katrina. Her credentials include organizing a paired set of conferences in New Orleans and London on Katrina-related affairs, maintaining a Katrina-oriented blog, and writing multiple articles on visual/cinematic “Katrina texts”. Sadly, her full book-length study of Katrina falls short of its full potential.
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