Event Review: The Maple Leaf and Eagle Conference 2022
The biennial Maple Leaf and Eagle Conference is an event of legendary status both in Helsinki and far outside Finland. For almost four decades, it has kept the tradition of the longest running conference at the University of Helsinki uninterrupted and has provided a dynamic venue of exploring and explaining the phenomenon that is North America. Despite the challenges and troubles of recent times, the event successfully took place in May 2022. For the first time in its history, the conference was organized in a hybrid form, both face-to-face and online. However, that was not the only thing exceptional about this year’s conference. It was set against a turbulent background of an unprecedented ongoing war and a refugee crisis in the middle of Europe, and Finland’s and Sweden’s historical decision to abandon their long-lasting policy of non-alignment in favor of applying for a NATO membership. These events are sure to […]
Continue ReadingReflection on ‘Responding to Sexual Violence in Higher Education – Organisations, Initiatives, and Activism’, BAAS 2022
Please note that this review contains discussion of sexual violence and harassment in higher education. First and foremost, the focus needs to be on the safety of individuals experiencing any form of sexual violence and to facilitate an open discussion on how to proceed with caution and confidence. Reader discretion is advised for trigger content such as personal experiences of sexual violence, struggle to fight against forms of sexual violence in higher education as well as information on silent forms of activism against sexual misconduct and violence. The British Association for American Studies (BAAS) Annual Conference, hosted by the University of Hull, was an opportunity to finally meet all those Americanists that many of us initially met and got to know as bobble heads in virtual conferences over the past two years. As always, BAAS’s supportive cohort spirit was palpable, as the conference offered the panels with topics ranging […]
Continue ReadingBAAS 2022 Panel Review: ‘Surveillance, Technology, and Discrimination in Literature and Culture Across the Americas’
‘Surveillance, Technology, and Discrimination in Literature and Culture Across the Americas’, British Association for American Studies Conference 2022, University of Hull, 21-23 April 2022 Surveillance and dystopian futures are increasingly urgent and generative areas of research for scholars of the contemporary Americas. Just recently, headlines have been dominated by the potential overturning of Roe vs Wade; consequently concerns have sparked over how data companies might be obliged by law enforcement to monitor women accessing abortion services.[i] What’s more, a two-year investigation by Georgetown University has revealed the extent of ICE’s data monitoring, pointing to the organisation’s increasingly expansive systems of domestic surveillance.[ii] It seems wholly fitting, then, that the BAAS 2022 conference hosted several panels exploring themes of surveillance. In particular, a rich and varied panel titled ‘Surveillance, Technology, and Discrimination in Literature and Culture Across the Americas’ discussed the intersections of surveillance, capitalism, gender, racialisation and dystopia in contemporary […]
Continue ReadingBAAS 2022 Panel Review: ‘Language and Multiculturalism in Contemporary Literature’
In the last thirty-five years, there has been a good deal of study of the relationship between language and multiculturalism, and between multiculturalism and contemporary literature. In ‘Language, Multiculturalism, and Identity: A Canadian Study’, a survey conducted by John Edwards and Joan Chisholm, the authors raise the probability of a weak link between language and group identity.[1] In ‘Disciplined to Diversity: Learning the Language of Multiculturalism’, Andrea Voyer stresses the connection between multicultural vocabulary and the construction of the socially acceptable, modern identities.[2] Pilar Villar-Argaiz explores the artistic visions of the multicultural Ireland in contemporary Irish literature.[3] Moreover, Adriano Elia conducts socio-historical analysis of multiculturalism through the lenses of cultural relativism and political correctness, based on two contemporary British novels, Londonstani by Gautam Malkani and The Islamist by Ed Husain.[4] However, none of these studies blends together three important elements – language, multiculturalism, and contemporary literature. In this respect, the […]
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 ReadingBAAS 2022 Panel Review: ‘Ecologies of Race and Gender in Nineteenth-Century American Culture’
F3 Ecologies of Race and Gender in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (sponsored by BrANCA) Opening the final day of BAAS 2022 was a BrANCA-sponsored panel titled “Ecologies of Race and Gender in Nineteenth-Century American Culture”, chaired by Matthew Pethers (University of Nottingham). The panel brought together research in nineteenth-century American literature by Olivia Foster (Nottingham Trent University), and nineteenth century cultural history by Dr. Tom F. Wright (University of Sussex). Foster’s paper, “Cohabiting with the Environment: An Ecocritical Reassessment of Sarah Piatt and Emily Dickinson” sought to tease out the multifaceted relationships that these nineteenth century poets articulated with the natural environment in their works. On the other hand, Wright’s paper, “‘Orenda’ and the Indigenous Origins of Charisma”, looked to the Indigenous American concept of ‘Orenda’, which roughly means the collective spiritual power held in the energies of natural objects. Wright takes up the concept of ‘Orenda’ to re-think the Western […]
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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