Review: ‘Legacies and Lifespans: Contemporary Women’s Writing in the 21st Century’
This conference offered a timely reflection upon work on contemporary women’s writing. It was particularly apt because this is a moment when a whole generation of feminist scholars are approaching retirement or have already retired.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Formations of United States Colonialism edited by Alyosha Goldstein
This collection’s ‘unique selling point’ is that it places the overseas empire and the settler colonialism of the United States in the same analytical frame. Influenced by the groundbreaking work of Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, Goldstein continues their work in attempting to highlight the error of U.S. imperial denial.
Continue ReadingBook Review: The Queerness of Native American Literature by Lisa Tatonetti
Throughout November 2015, U.S. Studies Online will be publishing a series of posts to mark Native American Heritage Month. In this post, Professor Joy Porter (University of Hull) reviews The Queerness of Native American Literature by Lisa Tatonetti.
Continue ReadingReview: ‘The (Re)production of Misery and the Ways of Resistance’ American Studies Association Conference
In what ways do we think about our bodies as active agents or passive recipients? How do we use misery as a form of resistance, and in what ways can resistance be subversive? How do we teach these issues in the classroom? These are a selection of the challenging, but enthralling questions delegates encountered at this year’s American Studies Association annual conference in Toronto, Canada.
Continue ReadingDocumentary Review: The Black Panther Party: Vanguard of the Revolution
Newly released documentary The Black Panther Party: Vanguard of the Revolution shows a lesser-seen side of the Black Panthers that marries the stylised, swaggering interpretations of Party members with the role of J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO and the frequently overlooked Survival Programmes.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Siblings: Brothers and Sisters in American History by C. Dallett Hemphill
From collective fun to mutual fondness, from emotional and financial support to bitter rivalry, and from abuse to acts of devotion this book is a cohesive narrative on intricacies of siblinghood in a country whose share of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was one of commotion, change, migration, social unrest, and attempts at self-definition and national coming-of-age.
Continue ReadingBook Review: The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neoliberal and Neoconservative Age by Alison Phipps
Two anecdotes in the opening pages of Alison Phipps’s The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neoliberal and Neoconservative Age set the scene for what is a thorough, if at times frustrating, investigation into the ‘difficulties of positioning for contemporary feminist theory and activism’ (2).
Continue ReadingBook Review: States of Trial: Manhood in Philip Roth’s Post-War America by Ann Basu
Given that Philip Roth has spent most of his career defending his writing, it’s appropriate that his ‘retirement’ would only be a spur to further debate amongst his readers. After a quiet announcement in the French cultural magazine Les InRocks (so quiet that the Anglophone world didn’t pick up on it until a full month later), Roth called time on a long and storied career. Since then, several critics have already published research that attempts to grapple with the complex issue of Roth’s literary legacy. One of the best of these works is Ann Basu’s recent monograph States of Trial.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Stuff Theory, Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism by Maurizia Boscagli
In Stuff Theory, Maurizia Boscagli approaches the object at a particular moment in the life-cycle of consumer capitalism. When things are no longer desirable – when the shine has worn off, or clothes become overworn, and knick-knacks are shoved to the back of the shelf – but are not yet broken-down enough to be comfortably categorised as trash, they become, for Boscagli, ‘stuff’.
Continue ReadingBook Review: New Literary Portraits of the American West: Contemporary Nevada Fiction by David Rio
Ranging from Basque immigrants to nuclear waste, the book engages with established depictions of the area through referencing non-Nevadans Hunter S Thompson and Joan Didion as well as less known Nevadan writers such as Frank Bergon and Robert Laxalt. Whilst positing new and dynamic readings, Rio remains sensitive to his reader’s expectations, throwing Las Vegas and Reno’s seedy underbelly in for good measure, producing the first book length study of its kind.
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