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Reviews

Book Review: U.S. Military Bases, Quasi-Bases and Domestic Politics in Latin America by Sebastian E. Bitar

Since 1999 all attempts by the US government to open formal military bases in Latin America have failed. This leads one to assume the US has lost much of its military influence in the region. However, the existence of so-called quasi-bases, or informal bases, discussed in Sebastian Bitar’s book, demonstrates that the US has managed to maintain its military influence. Quasi-bases differ from formal bases in no other way than that they lack a formal lease agreement for use of facilities. Essentially, quasi-bases serve the same purposes as formal bases, but exist in a cloud of secrecy.

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Book Review: Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932-1965 by Eric Schickler

Beginning his history with Roosevelt’s election in 1932, Schickler argues that civil rights was, put simply, ‘not part of the programmatic liberal vision in the early 1930s’ (27). With African American voters generally loyal to the party of Lincoln, and with Roosevelt attempting to appease both the organized labor movements of the South and West (who were generally resistant to civil rights) and conservative northeastern business interests, it took the creation of the Congress of Industrialized Organizations (CIO) in 1935 to bring African Americans into the coalition and redefine New Deal liberalism.

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Book Review: Literary Fiction: The Ways We Read Narrative Literature by Geir Farner

What can a linguist do for Americanist literary critics? Plenty.

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Review: Marilynne Robinson Symposium

While, as Ames states in Gilead, “Memory can make a thing seem more than it was”, this is certainly not the case for this thought-provoking and timely symposium. In providing a forum for discussion of new perspectives and research on Robinson’s work, the event was a resounding success.

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Review: ‘Ideas and Transformations in the Americas’, UCL Institute of the Americas PG Conference

Interdisciplinary panels, ranging from the ‘Unheard Voices of the Caribbean’ to ‘Transnational Perspectives of the US’, stimulated lively debate and reflection between chairs and audiences. These, and others, engaged with a range of historical approaches and topics.

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Review: ‘Radical America: Revolutionary, Dissident and Extremist Magazines’, The Second Network of American Periodical Studies Symposium

The legacies of these radical publications are still being felt, even as scholars continue to explore the origins, struggles, and issues surrounding a movement that, though it may appear in different places and at different times, often finds itself struggling with the same debates around politics, publication, and censorship wherever and whenever it might manifest.

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Book Review: The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace: Boredom and Addiction in an Age of Distraction by Adam S. Miller

Even for those only casually acquainted with the field of Wallace Studies, the sanctimonious title of this slender volume from Adam S. Miller (Collin College, Texas) – part of Bloomsbury’s ‘New Directions in Religion and Literature’ series – might prompt alarm bells. Indeed, whilst the claim on the back cover – that this is ‘the first book to explore key religious themes’ in the work of Wallace – may be technically true, this is not a subject area that will be unfamiliar to Wallace scholars.

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Review: ‘Civil Rights Documentary Cinema and the 1960s: Transatlantic Conversations on History, Race and Rights’

The remarkable collection of films shown throughout the conference demonstrated how documentaries could intervene in the historiography of the civil rights movement. The makers of these films, often in collaboration with historians, used their documentary films to question dominant narratives, uncover unknown stories, and expose overlooked figures in the civil rights movement.

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Book Review: Literature and the Law of Nations, 1580-1680 by Christopher N. Warren

It is a most intriguing business for an American Studies scholar to review a book that hardly mentions America at all.

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Review: ‘Mothering Slaves: Motherhood, Childlessness, and the Care of Children from Slavery to Emancipation’

‘Mothering Slaves: Motherhood, Childlessness, and the Care of Children from Slavery to Emancipation’, University of Reading, 19-21 April 2016. Following events at the University of Newcastle and the Universidade de São Paulo, this third meeting of the Mothering Slaves Research Network sought to bring together experienced and new researchers, from a wide range of disciplines and several continents with a shared focus on the intersections of trans-Atlantic slavery and motherhood. The Atlantic framework encouraged scholars to think more comparatively about the concept and practice of motherhood within enslavement. The three-day conference adopted a fresh outlook to topics such as abortion, childcare, childhood, childlessness, infanticide, rape, and reproduction, to name but a few. Over the three-day period, scholars came together to share research into the lives of women, mothers, and children from across the Americas. While the great majority of papers looked to North America, predominantly the antebellum South, there was an […]

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