Book Review: Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights by Samantha Pinto
In Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights, Samantha Pinto thinks about the ways in which black women come into political view by interrogating the premises of the female celebrity genre. She carefully considers what it means to be a political figure and situates the discourse of vulnerability at the centre of politics. Infamous Bodies consists of five chapters, each of which deals with a celebrity of the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Pinto thinks through five case studies, the private and public lives of Phillis Wheatley, Sally Hemings, Sarah Baartman, Mary Seacole, and Sarah Forbes Bonetta, and the ways in which they reverberate across different political moments and are taken up again in the following centuries.
Continue ReadingBook Review: The American Weird: Concept and Medium edited by Julius Greeve and Florian Zappe
The American Weird is an essay collection divided in two parts: ‘Concept’ and ‘Medium’. Its claim to originality lies in the latter part’s focus on manifestations of the weird in non-literary media running the gamut from film and music to television and videogames. Naturally, however, these cannot be discussed in isolation from the first part’s question of ‘concept’ – of what the weird is.
Continue ReadingPanel Review: ‘Elemental America’ BAAS Annual Conference 2021 (Online)
The British Association for American Studies (BAAS) held their 2021 conference entirely in a digital mode. This made the conference more sustainable and accessible – yet during a global pandemic, it is also a necessity. I’m currently based in Lisbon, so it was the only way I could ‘attend’ it! This being said, the conference was a breath of fresh air. This was especially true for the roundtable I attended via Zoom: ‘Elemental America’ took place on April 6th at 14:00-15:30 BST. It was organized and chaired by Dr. Moritz Ingwersen from the University of Konstanz. The theme of the roundtable was inspired by the concept of Elemental Ecocriticism from the 2015 book by the same name, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert. Elemental ecocriticism is how the elements feature in ecocriticism, which is the portrayal of the natural world in literature. However, this roundtable was also a […]
Continue ReadingReview: ‘Indigenous Mobilities: Travellers through the Heart(s) of Empire,’ Beyond the Spectacle (Online)
Organized by the collaborative AHRC research project “Beyond the Spectacle” (University of Kent, University of East Anglia and University of British Columbia), “Indigenous Mobilities: Travellers through the Heart(s) of Empire” engaged speakers in a 4-day discussion around the importance of Indigenous travels and movement in scholarly and non-scholarly debates. In particular, the conference advocated for the need to rewrite colonial narratives from an Indigenous point of view, and in so doing implement practices which can underscore the shaping impact of transnational Indigenous agents on the development of Empire(s). The conference (streamed online due to Covid restrictions) included more than 38 presentations in 15 panels. These papers touched on a wide range of topics, all also related to questions of Indigenous belonging, representation, and sovereignty. Despite the high quality of all the participants’ contributions, this review can only present a small thematical selection of all the papers discussed. One of the […]
Continue ReadingPanel Review: ‘Pop Cultural Interventions’ BAAS Annual Conference 2021 (Online)
One of the final sessions for the British Association for American Studies 2021 digital conference was titled Pop Cultural Interventions, chaired by Dr. James Peacock (Keele University). Pop culture covers a wide range of subjects and media which was reflected in this conference session, including discussion of film, television, social media and video gaming. Thematically, the first two presentations looked at how audience reaction to mainstream media and news events becomes creation and production of culture. The second two presentations discussed cultural projections and imaginations on to nature, and how this is used to reinforce cultural belief and ideology. Overall, the intertwining of culture as something produced, consumed and reproduced again, rather than something static, held all the presentations together. The speakers questioned what narratives are being told, what biases they might contain and looked at the historical significance of such narratives. Beginning the presentations, Dr. Lyndsay Miller (University of […]
Continue ReadingPlenary Speaker Interview: Laura Marks interviewed by Michael Hedges, BAAS 2021 Annual Conference
Laura U. Marks is the Principal Investigator of Tackling the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media, a research group at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. This interdisciplinary project brings together researchers from the university’s School for the Contemporary arts (Laura U. Marks and Radek Przedpełski) and the School of Engineering Science (Stephen Makonin and Alejandro Rodriguez-Silva). The project is funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Its aim is clear: to address the high and rising electricity consumption of information communication technologies. As the group sets out on its website, ‘[s]treaming media is calculated to contribute to a surprising 1% of global greenhouse gases, because most regions of the world obtain electricity from fossil fuels to power their data centers, networks, and devices. Streaming large files in large quantities, then, ethically implicates spectators in the warming of the planet.’ I sat down with Laura (over Zoom) to discuss the necessary […]
Continue ReadingBook Review: Diane Di Prima: Visionary Poetics and the Hidden Religions by David Stephen Calonne
Poets have often figured as the liaison between mystic items and the vast audience to whom the inner meaning of such items was mysterious or unknown. In this sense, poets act as prophets, translators of symbols or, more metaphorically, bridges. It is precisely the idea of the poet as a bridge which David Stephen emphasises in Diane di Prima: Visionary Poetics and the Hidden Religions. In this 2019 volume, the legendary figure of the late di Prima is portrayed in turn as a bridge between cultures, key literary and intellectual movements, and ethnicities.
Continue ReadingPanel Review: ‘Lights, Camera, Crash: Finance and Contemporary Genre Film’, BAAS Annual Conference 2021 (Online)
The conference for the 2021 British Association for American Studies was held entirely online this year in response to the global pandemic of Covid-19 and as a way to hold an almost carbon neutral conference in response to growing concerns around climate change. Indeed, the first session of the conference titled Lights, Camera, Crash: Finance and Contemporary Genre Film chaired by Dr. Cara Rodway (Deputy Head of the Eccles Centre at The British Library), thematically revolved around another global catastrophe: the financial crisis of 2008, when American stock market crashes created a wave of financial uncertainty for many across America and the world. The financial crash began with the accumulation of risky housing mortgages by investment insurance institutions, pension funds and insurance companies. Housing values plummeted dramatically as homeowners defaulted on their mortgages and investment banks were stuck with worthless investments and mounting debt. The entire financial stream froze, causing […]
Continue ReadingReview: “20/20 Vision: Citizenship, Space, Renewal,” EAAS Annual Conference 2021 (Online)
Organised by the European Association for American Studies, “20/20 Vision: Citizenship, Space, Renewal” coincided with the 400th anniversary of the establishment of the Plymouth Foundation and invited scholars to contemplate on American history, politics and culture. The conference called for an exploration of three broad thematic areas: the aspect of citizenship, issues of the environment and the idea of renewal. The overarching concept of “20/20 vision”, an optical term denoting normal visual clarity and sharpness of sight, sought to underscore pressing questions on historical distance, visibility and invisibility of various American socio-historical, cultural and literary aspects. In this way, the event allowed Americanists – mostly from European and American academia – to re-frame and re-evaluate the plurality of narratives and counter-narratives throughout the history of the American nation. The quadricentennial became a reference point not only for sheer celebration but also critical thinking. In the keynote lecture “1620 / 2020: […]
Continue ReadingBook Review: Trump and Us: What He Says and Why People Listen by Roderick P. Hart
Roderick P. Hart’s book was written in a time noisy with the sounds and echoes of Donald Trump’s Twitter feed. The political world is quieter now. Former President Trump can hardly be heard from his Florida base. He has not disappeared, and his continuing influence on the Republican Party and on the practice of US politics is evidenced by the nervous cotillion being performed around him. Witness Senator Mitch McConnell who, in rapid succession, voted to acquit Trump in the second impeachment trial, made a speech excoriating Trump for his role in prompting the January 6th 2021 attack on the US Capitol, and only days later affirmed that he would ‘absolutely’ support Trump’s return to the White House should the Donald gain the GOP nomination in 2024.
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