Review: Marx and Marxism in the United States
Conference Review: ‘Marx and Marxism in the United States: A One-Day Symposium’, University of Nottingham, 11 May 2019. In 1906, German economist and sociologist Werner Sombart declared that there was no socialism – and no class consciousness – in the United States. Just over a decade later, America was plunged into its first Red Scare over fears of radical socialist and anarchist influence on newly emerging leftist organisations and trade unions. This hysteria ebbed and flowed, reaching another peak in the early post-war period spearheaded by Senator Joseph McCarthy. With the increasing embrace of socialism by young Americans in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, it is clear that the relationship between socialism and Americanism has been nothing short of turbulent. Throughout all these developments, one figure has loomed large – Karl Marx. This symposium, co-organised by Christopher Phelps (University of Nottingham) and Robin Vandome (University of Nottingham), invited […]
Continue ReadingReview: BAAS Annual Conference 2019
Review: BAAS 64th Annual Conference, 25-27 April 2019, University of Sussex “The only reason you’d go to uni,” the young man on the train confidently declared to his friend, “is so you don’t have to work anymore.” The participants of the BAAS 64th Annual Conference, to which I was travelling, quickly proved him wrong. Over the course of three days Americanists from the UK and far beyond discussed current issues in the field, built new networks, and expanded existing ones. Given that the conference was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots and took place in Brighton, a city with a rich LGBTQ+ history, it should come as no surprise that the LGBTQ+ experience proved a central theme throughout. Activism and radicalism also took centre stage, both within academic sessions and beyond, with a walking tour to celebrate Brighton’s queer legacy and a one man show by Ian Ruskin […]
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 ReadingReview: Irish Association for American Studies Annual Conference 2019
Conference Review: ‘Confidence-Men and Hucksters, Corruption and Governance in the U.S.’, Irish Association for American Studies Annual Conference, University College Cork, Ireland, April 12th-13th 2019 https://iaas.ie/iaas-annual-conference/ Interested in the parallels between Donald Trump’s presidency and the 2004 novel The Plot Against America, in January 2017, The New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/philip-roth-e-mails-on-trump) contacted acclaimed Jewish-American novelist Philip Roth for comment. His response? Donald Trump is ‘just a con artist.’ For Roth, Trump is more aptly captured in Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man, a novel which ‘could just as well have been called ‘The Art of the Scam.’ Indeed, it is this meeting of fact and fiction described here by Roth – recent political developments along with Melville’s complex and remarkably prophetic 1857 novel – that motivate the theme of this year’s Irish Association for American Studies Annual Conference, held in University College Cork, Ireland from the 12th-13th April, 2019. Roth’s remarks were recalled […]
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.
Continue ReadingBook 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.
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