Faith-healer parents, child brides, and 12-year-old Tobacco pickers
The day before President Joseph R. Biden’s inauguration, the National Children’s campaign held a virtual children’s inauguration. Speakers included politicians, such as Massachusetts senator Ed Markey (D), and young activists themselves, several of whom called for the creation of a ‘White House office for kids’, arguing that the political establishment fails to consider and protect the rights of young Americans. This article briefly details three areas where children are not protected from harm: medical neglect law, child marriage, and child labour in agriculture. Based on the standards the US federal government applies to other countries, its failure to ratify international agreements on children’s rights, and aspects of the US Constitution, the United States must be considered a failing state when it comes to children’s rights. Children’s Medical and Fourteenth Amendment Rights With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and vaccination response, parental rights to refuse vaccinations for children has once again been […]
Continue ReadingNot Your Grandparents’ Grand Strategy: Rethinking Liberal Hegemony
Since the end of the Cold War, America’s commitment to a grand strategy of liberal hegemony has habitually set the parameters of foreign policy debate. The bipartisan consensus in Washington D.C. sees the United States as the indispensable nation whose leadership is required in perpetuity in the name of upholding the liberal international order. Liberal hegemony is liberal in the sense that it vows to use American power to defend and spread traditional liberal values such as individual freedoms, democratic governance and a market-based economy. The strategy is one of hegemony because it identifies America as the benevolent hegemon that is uniquely qualified to spread these principles abroad. This universalist logic sees the advancement of a liberal international order as not only essential for American security and prosperity, but as desirable for the rest of the world. As such, a moralistic fervour has become axiomatic in US foreign policy making […]
Continue ReadingAmerica Now
In this short series, a group of scholars consider important issues facing the United States as the Biden administration begins and the economic and health crises facing the country continue. Ellis Mallett considers the US position in foreign relations in her article, “Not Your Grandparents’ Grand Strategy: Rethinking Liberal Hegemony“. Jack Hodgson provides a succinct overview of the children’s rights and their status in the United States in his article, “Faith-healer parents, child brides, and 12-year-old Tobacco pickers“. Olga Theirbach-McLean contemplates the US’s relationship to capitalism in her article, “Reality Check or Business as Usual? COVID-19 and the future of US Capitalism“. Emma Woodhead investigates Civil War memory in the work of George Saunders and how it resonates in our current moment in her article, “(Re)Constructing the Past in George Saunders’ ‘CivilWarLand in Bad Decline‘”.
Continue ReadingSpaces of Empire: Two Early Modern Views from both sides of the Atlantic
In order to understand the relationship between empire and space in American history, it is necessary to address the historiographical tendencies and myths of the past four hundred years.[i] Retrospective historiographical myths of the nascent United States, as it sought to establish its own history in the shadow of the mother country, England, need to be distinguished from ideas and practices of empire prior to US independence. The importance of this break between early and late modernity in the history of US nation building and nascent imperial aspirations becomes clear once the historical and theological details are taken into consideration. Two histories of empire from both sides of the early eighteenth-century Atlantic reveal diverging aspirations and conceptions of space and empire at work in the mother country and in early modern New England. It is now widely recognized that early modernity is significant for understanding the later imperial aspirations of […]
Continue ReadingFor a Series so Concerned with Leaning into the Horror, The Handmaid’s Tale Utterly Fails to Address Race
Whenever the TV series or the new sequel to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale are mentioned, the same question arises: do we really want to know what happens after Offred (pre-Gilead name June) steps “into the darkness within; or else the light”? This is June’s infamous last line, which finds its way into the first series with meticulous fidelity before the HBO adaptation continues her timeline. Until Atwood released The Testaments in 2019, critics have been asking whether the HBO adaptation ought to have done this – yet the original novel did play with such boundaries, giving readers glimpses of past lives and future conclusions about those lives in the academic conference provided in the “Historical Notes.” What makes Handmaid so appropriate for this golden age of television is that the political premise finds its place just as comfortably in the Trump era as it did under Reagan.
Continue ReadingVideo Games and American Studies: Reverberations of Trumpism in Far Cry 5
Politics and contexts of publication are two interesting focalisers when examining video games from an American Studies perspective. While not all video games are overtly political, many have explicit political agendas. The example of Far Cry 5 shows how real-world political rhetoric can find parallels in virtual environments, in this case the ludonarrative design of a video game.
Continue ReadingVideo Games and American Studies: Weirding the Empire in West of Loathing and Other Digital Games
Stepping beyond the game’s comical and surrealist façade affords a closer look at the ways West of Loathing de-mythologizes and parodies the US West in a subtle, pun-oriented sub-generic rendering of the Wild West, that is, the Weird West.
Continue ReadingVideo Games and American Studies: Red Dead Redemption 2 and the Marketing of a More Inclusive West
The most influential and lucrative Western released in 2018 wasn’t a film or television series, but a video game. Red Dead Redemption 2 was released on 26 October 2018 and earned $725 million in the first three days, the best opening weekend in entertainment history.
Continue ReadingVideo Games and American Studies: Introduction to the Series
Since the 1980s, video games have proliferated globally and had a corresponding cultural impact. Considering that the USA has been the major site of the culture industry driving this development both economically and symbolically, few would deny that video games are important objects of study with regard to American culture.
Continue ReadingSocial Disorder: Publics, 1968, Amateur photography and Vivian Maier
This essay is the fourth in our series, ‘Literature, Visual Imagery and Material Culture in American Studies’. The series seeks to situate literature, visual imagery and material culture at the heart of American studies, and will explore the varying ways in which written and non-written sources have been created, politicised, exploited, and celebrated by the diverse peoples of the United States and beyond. You can find out more information here.
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