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British Association for American Studies

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Reviews

Panel Review: ‘Lineages of Black Activism’, BAAS Annual Conference 2021 (Online)

Organized by the Digital British Association for American Studies, the 66th American Studies conference invited scholars to critically engage with American literature, history, culture and politics in North America, the United States and the Americas more broadly. All sessions took place remotely through a digital events platform, Zoom. In the context of the sixtieth anniversary of the Freedom Rides, an iconic and much-celebrated landmark of civil rights protests Dr. Hannah Jeffery, Dr. Astrid Haas and Dr. John Kirk explored counter-narratives to the official records of Black activism. More specifically, Dr. Jeffery (University of Edinburgh) used a series of murals as a narrative thread through her discussion of Black activism. She analyzed the significance of different murals which first appeared during the 1960s and subsequently turned into subversive cultural forms. More specifically, she focused on The Wall of Truth (1969) and the muralist Eugene Eda Wade that turned into sites of communal […]

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Book Review: Laughing to Keep from Dying by Danielle Fuentes Morgan

Laughing to Keep From Dying centres its discussion on the ways satire enables a social commentary which illustrates the power of Black selfhood; satire becomes a new form of social justice. (2) The texts discussed in this book ‘reveal critical anxieties about race and critique the irrationality of racialization’. (3) This critique draws attention to the mistreatment of African Americans and initiates a discourse about racial inequality in America.

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Roundtable Review: ‘American Studies in the Twenty-First Century’, BAAS Annual Conference 2021 (Online)

In his introduction to ‘American Studies in the Twenty-First Century’, Andrew Fearnley (University of Manchester), who co-organized the roundtable with Hilary Emmett (University of East Anglia), argued that the “greatest challenge that faces British American Studies is our subject’s diminishing profile among young people.” This panel sought to consider how we should explain what American Studies is today to the public and to potential American Studies undergraduates, who are increasingly being drawn away from American Studies towards other subjects. How do we explain this field to those who have little or no knowledge of what it is? What words best capture what it is we do today in American Studies departments, or in American Studies degrees? To begin addressing these questions, the roundtable brought together five speakers from different institutions around the United Kingdom. These speakers brought a variety of backgrounds and experiences teaching American Studies to the panel, a […]

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Plenary Review: Dr Laura Marks, BAAS Annual Conference 2021 (Online)

‘Conference Review: ‘British Association for American Studies 2021’, Plenary Address: ‘Streaming Media, Online Conferences, and the Jevons Paradox’, 5th April 2021.   Dr Laura U. Marks’ opening plenary at the 66th British Association for American Studies (BAAS) came after a year during which many of us have organised, attended, or presented at an online conference. Some will have tallied up an impressive combination of all three. We have grown accustomed to addressing an audience of dozens through the webcams on our computers, taking it on trust that the delegates are there at all. Posing questions to eminent researchers from our kitchen tables in semi-formal attire – from the waist up, at least – is now second nature. The benefits of moving conferences online in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic soon racked up. It has hugely improved accessibility, particularly for the d/Deaf community. Online conferencing has brought increased opportunities for […]

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Panel Review: ‘Recent Work in Asian American Studies’

Chaired by Eithne Quinn, the roundtable ‘Recent Work in Asian American Studies’ was a critical component of the larger British Association for American Studies (BAAS) conference. Deeper discussion of marginalised texts and authors is always pertinent, and this certainly includes the entire “body” of Asian American literature with its many intricate blends of genres and movements, which only became an official field of study in 1982. Considering the horrific murders of six Asian American women in Georgia in March 2021, as well as the increasing violence and abuse recently enacted on Asian Americans as blame for Covid-19, it was particularly appropriate to counter such prejudice with a session that both celebrated developments of Asian American writers, as well as zealously urged further scholarship in an under-studied area. The presentations also warned that even throughout our growing awareness of the evils of racial privilege and bias, it is extremely easy to […]

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Book Review: The Age of Hiroshima edited by Michael D. Gordin and G. John Ikenberry

The essays chosen for The Age of Hiroshima are an attempt by its editors to, in their words, ‘unsettle’ the legacy and understanding of the bombing of Hiroshima, an act that ushered in the nuclear age. (2) This collection explores the nuclear age from a global perspective, rather than simply through the viewpoint of the Cold War.

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Panel Review: ‘Instapoetry and Hypercapitalism,’ BAAS Annual Conference 2021 (Online)

April 2021 has seen the return of the British Association of American Studies annual conference, organised by Suzanne Enzerink, in a newly digital form. Following the necessary cancellation of the BAAS 2020 conference due to the coronavirus pandemic, this year’s event was a long-anticipated opportunity to bring together Americanists throughout the UK and across the world after a year of working from home. Being BAAS’s first virtual conference, it offered an unprecedented chance to radically reimagine forms of academic community and knowledge exchange, envisioning not only a sustainably low-carbon footprint event, but one without the usual barriers of travel, time commitment (most panels being recorded for non-live audiences), and cost. One significant outcome of the conference’s online forum was its inclusive and expansive discussion regarding the relation between money, work, creativity, and autonomy in our increasingly digitised late capitalist society. This is an issue pervading both the arts and academia, […]

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Book Review: What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era By Carlos Lozada

Carlos Lozada. What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era. (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2020). pp. 272. £20.  Even before Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016, numerous books began to appear that attempted to diagnose the Trump phenomenon and situate it in relation to American politics and culture. Throughout Trump’s disastrous term as president, Trump-themed books were released at a relentless pace, and even more are sure to follow in the coming years now that he has been voted out of office. While many of these books are compelling and illuminating, the weakest ones have been those that have attempted to boil Trump’s dismaying victory down to some simple monocausal answer. With these factors in mind, I was intrigued by Carlos Lozada’s book What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era (2020), which provides an overview of some 150 recent books […]

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Book Review: The Sum of Our Dreams by Louis Masur

Louis P. Masur’s three-hundred-something page history of the United States is positioned as an introductory text, ‘a foundation of knowledge’ (xvii). All the familiar faces put in an appearance, from John Smith to Frederick Douglass; Horatio Alger to Martin Luther King Jr. Masur quotes Benjamin Franklin on death and taxes, Neil Armstrong on small steps and great leaps, and Gordon Gekko on the goodness of greed. He lingers on the Founding Fathers, on Lincoln, on the two Roosevelts, on Nixon, on Trump. In the four hundred and thirty years this book covers, the only women who receive more than passing mention are Harriet Beecher Stowe and Hilary Rodham Clinton.

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Review: SASA Annual Conference 2021 (Online)

When James Baldwin wrote that “The story of the Negro in America is the story of America”[1] he questioned the ways in which history weighs upon what it means to be Black. Moreover, he asked us to recognise that what it meant to be American was tied up with the history of subjugation. The persistent dehumanisation of African Americans was, for Baldwin, linked to the myth of America. But the real stories of America were those that Black Americans had to tell and these, wrote Baldwin, are the stories that “no American is prepared to hear.”[2] The question of how, and by whom, the stories of Black America are told formed the basis for discussions across several panels at the 22nd Annual SASA conference. Papers by Postgraduate and Postdoctoral Researchers discussed Black narratives from Slavery to the Black Lives Matter movement, asking who tells the story of Black America and […]

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