Book Review: Richard Wright in a Post-Racial Imaginary edited by William Dow, Alice Craven and Yoko Nakamura
The collection is a long-awaited product of a 2008 Conference at the American University of Paris, one of many events held to mark Richard Wright’s birth centennial, and, much like the Paris conference itself, argues for Wright’s increased relevancy in an increasingly transnational and seemingly post-racial culture.
Continue ReadingWhat We Learned: Organiser’s report on the 1st Americas Postgraduate Conference at the UCL Institute of the Americas
In part two of our 1st Americas Postgraduate conference double header the organisers James Hillyer, Anthony Teitler, Thomas Maier and William Sawyers offer some useful organising tips for next year.
Continue ReadingReview of the 1st Americas Postgraduate Conference at the UCL Institute of the Americas
Nik Kyriacou reviews the 1st Americas Postgraduate conference at UCL’s Institute of the Americas in our first conference review double header.
Continue ReadingBook Review: The Rational Southerner: Black Mobilization, Republican Growth, and the Partisan Transformation of the American South by M. V. Hood III, Quentin Kidd, and Irwin L. Morris
One of the most intriguing questions in modern American political history is the process by which the Republican Party mutated from the party of bi-racial progressive alliances to that of white conservatism. Precisely how and why this process took place has been the subject of much scholarly debate since the middle of the twentieth century.
Continue ReadingEnemies at Home: THE AMERICANS Season Three
For all its frequent use of Russian language (the extensive use of subtitles is striking in an American TV show) and Soviet protagonists, the heart of The Americans plays into the most mythic US trope of them all: the individual in the wilderness.
Continue ReadingBook Review: The Myth of Emptiness and the New American Literature of Place by Wendy Harding
Coinciding with the summer 2014 issue of Granta entitled ‘American Wild’, and the news in October that the term ‘anthropocene’ might soon be officially adopted as the name of our epoch, the publication of Harding’s monograph could not be more prescient.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Embodying Masculinities: Towards a History of the Male Body in U.S. Culture and Literature edited by Josep M. Armengol
It is a tricky thing, in a culture that still clings to the vestiges of a patriarchal structure, to make a legitimate case for the study of those who – knowingly or not – benefit most from such a power structure.
Continue ReadingReview (Part Two) of IAAS Annual Conference
The design and implementation of a runaway artificial intelligence was a concern felt by many of the panellists. An AI that proved particularly threatening was one that may be built upon the incorporation of human minds into a computer network. The potential for an omnipresent surveillance filtered into an important term used at the conference – ‘hive mind’.
Continue ReadingReview (Part One) of IAAS Annual Conference
Usually in conferences, there are one or two panels that do not quite fit the theme. Not this year. Tied together by an excellent plenary from Dr. Lee Jenkins (University College Cork) it demonstrated the power that sight, surveillance, and vision possess on a multi-disciplinary scale.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Kennedy: A Cultural History of an American Icon by Mark White
The theme of the duality of Kennedy’s image is illustrated most effectively by two seemingly contradictory elements. The conflicting depiction of Kennedy as both a sex symbol and a family man is thoroughly examined by White.
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