Spaces and Spatialities of Empire – An Introduction
As the United States expanded, first across the continent, and later, overseas at the beginning of the 20th century—expounding an anti-imperialist rhetoric that rejected European models of colonialism—it nonetheless colonized minds, mines, and markets.[i] And yet, despite currency in contemporary discourses that grapple with the many manifestations of US global power and its practices at home and across the globe, few other concepts in US history have proven as impossible as “empire.” In what has turned out to be an enduring war of words, the term continues to elude attempts at mapping it onto the course the United States has taken politically, economically, and culturally. As the American economist Scott Nearing contended ninety-nine years ago, “Many minds will refuse to accept the term ‘empire’ as applied to a republic (1921, 7).” A main outcome of this political duality and the ensuing historical conundrum has been that the intellectual idée fixe […]
Video 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.
Book Review: Siblings: Brothers and Sisters in American History by C. Dallett Hemphill
From collective fun to mutual fondness, from emotional and financial support to bitter rivalry, and from abuse to acts of devotion this book is a cohesive narrative on intricacies of siblinghood in a country whose share of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was one of commotion, change, migration, social unrest, and attempts at self-definition and national coming-of-age.