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British Association for American Studies

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Reviews

Review: ‘The “Not Yet” of the Nineteenth-Century U.S.’, British Association of Nineteenth Century Americanists Symposium

Alert to forms of belatedness and anachronism, and attuned to the variously apocalyptic and utopian temporalities of the era, this timely conference on untimeliness suggested that the future is bright for BrANCA and for the field.

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Review: Magazines on the Move: North American Periodicals and Travel

In our contemporary moment, technological advances in print and online publications increase the speed and ease of the movement of ideas, developments which mirror the technological advances that impact how people are transported from one place to another.

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Review: Bluecoat 300: Charity, Philanthropy and the Black Atlantic

2017 marked two anniversaries in Liverpool: the tercentenary of the Bluecoat building, a contemporary arts centre which was originally constructed as a charity school in 1717, and the tenth anniversary of the International Slavery Museum. Like many institutions founded in eighteenth-century Liverpool, Bluecoat was supported by funds derived from maritime trade; in particular, the transatlantic slave trade. As part of Bluecoat’s year-long anniversary programme, special attention has been paid to exploring the building’s connections to slavery.

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Book Review: Noise Uprising by Michael Denning

As Benedict Anderson’s concept of nationalism relies on the omnipresence of ‘print capitalism’, so Michael Denning here argues that decolonisation depended on an era of ‘sound capitalism’ – a new, urban, plebeian music that circled the world. In this sense, then, while there is no clear moment when the ear was ‘decolonised’, the battle over sound and music was central to the struggle over colonialism.

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Book Review: The Saltwater Frontier by Andrew Lipman

Most historical accounts of the colonisation of New England focus on  territorial claims made on certain swathes of land between the Hudson River and Cape Cod. Not so Andrew Lipman. Unequivocal in his rejection of ‘surf and turf’ histories, in The Saltwater Frontier Lipman argues that by focusing on the ocean itself as a paradigm of shifting territories, his book offers ‘a new way of thinking about Indian history and a new way of understanding this all-too-familiar region’.

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Review: Investigating Identities in Young Adult (YA) Narratives

Despite divided opinion regarding characterisation, the conference demonstrated that YA fiction undoubtedly offers the opportunity for a wealth of analysis in relation to identity. Regardless of the medium, YA narratives present journeys through the liminal space of adolescence towards identity creation and this, perhaps, is their defining characteristic; whether a cohesive genre or not.

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Book Review: An American Genocide by Benjamin Madley

In ‘An American Genocide’, Benjamin Madley analyses the devastating demographic decline of California Indians. California’s Native American population declined from about 150,000 people to 30,000 in the period 1846-1873. Madley draws heavily on the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. As he explains, this convention provides a powerful analytical tool to help scholars explain what happened to California’s indigenous people.

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Book Review: The Jolly Corner and Other Tales by Henry James and N.H. Reeve

The word perhaps most associated with Henry James is ‘difficult’. James, ‘The Master’, wrote weighty tomes—masterpieces of literature—fraught with long-winded, circumlocutory, or rather uniquely expressive, sentences. He is generally considered to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James aims to provide, for the first time, a full scholarly edition of the novels and tales of this 20th Century American writer.

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Review: ‘Land and Water: Port Towns, Maritime Connections, and Oceanic Spaces of the Early Modern Atlantic World’, BGEAH Annual Conference 2017

Portsmouth was an ideal city to hold a conference on the theme of port towns with its rich maritime history. The Roanoke colonists set sail from Portsmouth in 1587, and it has been a base for the navy since the early modern period.

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Review: HOTCUS PG Conference 2017 – Contesting Power: Rights, Justice, and Dissent in America and Beyond

Given the overarching theme of the conference, it is unsurprising that activism and dissent in the United States were recurring themes, and papers considered, for example, feminist responses to the AIDS crisis, and radical politics within VISTA during the Nixon years.

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