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Reviews

Book Review: We Are An African People by Russell Rickford

In We are an African People, historian Russell Rickford attempts and succeeds to define an era within African American culture where new models of pedagogy and identity were being explored by African Americans. Rickford researches the establishment and ultimate redundancy of Pan African, Afrocentric schools within the USA during the period post-Civil Rights era; where the ‘freedoms’ of African Americans were celebrated, and a ‘post racial’ ideology set. There were many, within the African American community, grappling with their racial identity and equality in a system that was underwritten by the White majority.

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Review: ‘Americans in the World’, HOTCUS Winter Symposium 2021 (Online)

Co-organized by Uta Balbier (HOTCUS Coordinator and Senior Lecturer in Modern History at King’s College) and Jennifer Chochinov (third year Ph.D candidate in History at King’s College), ‘Americans in the World’ invited scholars to inquire how non-state actors connected the United States to the rest of the world and complicated the ideological underpinnings of America’s informal empire during the twentieth century. In doing so, the conference organisers wished also to highlight a recent shift in diplomatic history’s focus: from the traditional inquire of the diplomatic exchanges, military interventions and foreign trade to the individual experiences abroad of students, artists, missionaries, athletes, and scholars among others. Keynote speaker Kaeten Mistry (Senior lecturer in American Studies at the University of East Anglia and historian of United States and the world) devoted his lecture to showing the huge impact that the diplomatic history’s cultural turn had on the research field. Mistry stressed the […]

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Book Review and Author Interview: The Centenal Cycle Trilogy by Malka Older

A pivotal election has the international public on edge. As rivaling political forces vie for political power, digital communication media becomes the weapon of choice in a fierce ideological battle. Like an autoimmune disorder, the free flow of information meant to protect democracy threatens to destroy it from the inside, with conspiracies real and imagined putting the social fabric to a dramatic stress test.

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Book Review: The Beats: A Literary History by Steven Belletto

Steven Belletto’s impeccably well-researched literary history, The Beats, traces the Beat Generation’s interrelationship between creativity, a writer’s life and literary connections, and literary production. The synergies, networks, and affiliations Belletto highlights are invaluable, and prove his point that the ‘richest way to appreciate individual Beat texts is in relation to one another.’ (xi)

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Book Review: Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood by Rebecca Brückmann

The stereotypical idea of the southern lady, in ‘her silent influence, in her eternal vigil’, was belied by photographs of white women who protested school desegregation by screaming at young Black children.[i] Rebecca Brückmann’s study, Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood: White Women, Class, and Segregation, is a significant contribution to the growing body of scholarship that shows that white southern women were neither passive nor powerless in their support of segregation.

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Book Review: An Intimate Economy by Alexandra J. Finley

Alexandra J. Finley’s new book, An Intimate Economy, examines the vital role that women played in the US economy in the mid-nineteenth century, focusing primarily on enslaved and formerly enslaved African American women. The majority of that examination is done through the personal histories of African American women who were able to use their economic positions, both whilst enslaved and in freedom, to gain some form of power and independence.

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Book Review: Chemical Heroes: Pharmacological Supersoldiers in the US Military by Andrew Bickford

Supersoldiers are often found in comic books and cinemas, but anthropologist Andrew Bickford covers the real attempts to bring the hero off the page and into reality. Chemical Heroes follows the development of the US military’s efforts to biomedically enhance their soldiers in response to the prediction that the future of warfare is a pharmaceutical battlefield.

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Review: HELAAS Young Scholar Symposium – ‘Conflict and Negotiation in American Culture(s)’ (Online)

HELAAS Young Scholar Symposium triumphantly defied the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in an innovative, fully digital format which comprised a week-long asynchronous phase, and a synchronous Q&A session phase on September 19, 2020. However, the symposium’s creative surprise, i.e. the production of the play Women of Ciudad Juarez by the American theatre company TeatroTravieso/ Troublemaker Theatre – along with its post-performance workshop on social theatre politics, aesthetics, and feminicide by educator and director Jimmy Noriega – had to comply with the initial planning and inevitably preceded the aforementioned digital turn of the symposium as it was held on March 6, 2020. The symposim further welcomed two special guests: EAAS President Philip McGowan and US Consul General, Elizabeth Lee who both commented on the significance of bridging conflicts particularly in the current pandemic climate. The conference theme of ‘Conflict and Negotiation in American Culture(s)’ problematised the centrifugal and centripetal forces embedded in contemporary […]

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Book Review: The Value of Herman Melville by Geoffrey Sanborn

Given Herman Melville’s towering status in American literary and cultural history, it seems rather odd to ponder his ‘value’: his reputation and elevated position in the cultural canon are sufficient to over-awe the reader and convince them that his works must be what is casually referred to as ‘great literature’.

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Review: Maple Leaf and Eagle Conference – “North America: Inclusive, Exclusive, and Exceptional” (Online)

The biennial Maple Leaf and Eagle Conference is the longest running conference at the University of Helsinki, and one of the most prominent academic events in the field of North American studies organized in Finland. Since 1986, it has been being a vibrant venue for exploring North America from a variety of political, ideological and conceptual backgrounds, and a truly interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary conference attracting numerous participants from both sides of the Atlantic. This year it invited scholars to investigate the fluid boundaries and meanings of inclusion, exclusion, and exceptionalism in North American contexts. Yet while sending the CFP in 2019, the conference organizers had no idea how exceptional (and thus fitting the topic of the conference) the coming year of 2020 would be. It has happened to be the year of historic events that are to define the fate of North America and the whole world for years and […]

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